About 2 years ago, I created a kind of companion Ning site for the blog, but it never really achieved much until earlier this year, when I noticed a sudden influx of visitors. I hadn't paid much attention to Ning prior to that, so I thought I'd look into it some more. In the 2 years or so I'd been ignoring it, they'd added some great new features, so I started investing a little more time with it. I'm pleased I did.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I would start posting all new items to the Ning site and just leave FlightSimDaily as an archive.

Why? Running both of the sites was just too time consuming. There was also a lot of cross-site duplication. But, more importantly, I was starting to not particularly enjoy running the blog. It was taking a lot of time to keep up-to-date and, whilst it was getting enough hits (around 3,500 - 5,000 uniques per day), it was a little soul destroying, in as much as most visitors where coming from Google, looking at one page and being on their way. There was virtually no interaction with visitors, with little commenting taking place.

I'd also noticed that the Ning site was really gaining in popularity, to the point where we now have over 1,500 members. More importantly, we have a lot of regular returning visitors, who are all helping to contribute to the great content on the site. The sense of community is terrific, and I really feel like I'm part of something fun and useful, rather than just going through the motions.

I've made a lot of new friends through the site, too, which only adds to the enjoyment.

What of Ning themselves? Overall, I've been very impressed. Uptime is extremely good and they continually add new features and tweak existing ones. I've paid for a few of their Premium services to remove most of their branding so, to the visitor, it doesn't really look like a Ning site any longer.

So was it the right move? For me, I'd have to say yes. I'm actually having fun with my site again, and that's worth more than pure numbers of visitors. Having said that, my daily uniques are on the climb and I can only see this improving with the ever growing membership.

It'll not be right for all sites, by any means, but with this particular niche, it's turned out to be a good fit.

Only problem is, I only have 1 contact in there at the moment, so it's difficult to see what all the fuss is about! However, I can see the potential.

If you know me and feel like waving at me, my wave address is mark.avey@googlewave.com. I've sent out some invitations and have 4 remaining, so stick a comment below if you'd like one.