Hellobee Boards

Yah, on WB three real life friends/people I know figured me out. Three very different ways too, kinda really freaky.

hmm you guys... so if you try to avoid someone, anyone that you know in real life to figure you out on hellobee, how could you know for sure that they are not already on the boards and won't join the gold membership? Then wouldn't you get more screwed because you are probably posting family pictures and spilling details about your sex life and what not because of the idea of "privacy"?

I too question what's the point of the added privacy... if you don't want someone to know about something, don't put it online. And don't bash anyone you know online! haha! I agree with OP that hellobee is already way more secure than facebook. But that's just me. Maybe I don't have enough friends like you guys do

Right, @Irene... It's not like Gold members know who all the Gold members are. At this time, lurkers can be Gold too...

I was careless when HB first launched and I liked them on FB... I do think a friend or two noticed that in their news feed and checked out the site... I used to post more regularly and I wouldn't be surprised if they figured out who I am on here. But, whatever... I don't mind too much since whatever I post, I imagine I'd be open to discussing it IRL too.

<< @Mrs. Cowgirl: something I've wondered about - when you search things on google, often forum questions from baby center and other places come up a lot, but I think only once or twice has hellobee popped up... Is that by design of HB or the site is too small to come up at top of results? >>

@runnerd: Parenting sites (blogs and forums) have been around for years and years... so a lot of the keywords that people search for already have a lot of forum posts written about them! As we cover more and more niche topics on the blogs though, we're starting to get more and more inbound traffic from Google... over time, that should grow and grow.

There are some sites out there that have excellent content, like Kellymom... these will be tough to outrank on Google, unless we cover topics they're not covering. Then there are other parenting forums - often unmoderated - that aren't as high quality. I think that in the long term, these sites will fall in the Google rankings.

In any case, a huge amount of our traffic now comes from social media (especially Pinterest)... that traffic is attracted less to useful content, and more to fun/inspirational pictures/projects/DIYs. So to attract that content, we work to put out stuff like DIY projects and food recipes (those tend to do really well on Pinterest).

Since Google is pretty crowded these days on the parenting side, we've found that sites like Pinterest and StumbleUpon let us break through the clutter. It's amazing how things change with the times! We'll do our best to keep up and adapt.

And I'm hopeful that Hellobee will show up more and more in Google in the years to come!