Spruz Owners' Community For owners of websites powered by the Spruz Platform

This week's Community of the Week is Uniquic Networking Online, created by UNIQUIC.

If you'd like to see your site featured as a Community of the Week please post an introduction following our guidelines.

Uniquic Networking Online

1. Could you explain what your site is about for those that aren't familiar with it?

We are a group  of business professionals who empower, develop, and enhance each other.

2. What gave you the idea to create a site? Was it a natural extension of a hobby or passion you already had?

It was a natural part of our company, in that we offer fashion, style, beauty and health information to our clients. So creating a site to give information to our fellow small business owners wasn't a stretch for us.

3. Is your site a join effort between you and other co-creators, or did you create it by yourself?

It was mostly done by myself with some input from my co-creator in our company.

4. How did you hear about Spruz?

I went on a Google search and looked for a free online networking sites.

5. What feature has your community found most useful?

Our community finds the forum we call the "Message Board" the most useful.  It connects everyone together if they aren't in the same group.

6. Do you have any tips or suggestions for other site owners? Was there anything you wish you had known when you created your community that you know today?

Some suggestions that I would make to offer site owners are to create site rules in the beginning and stick to them and to moderate all petitions to join their communities.  It's like your home ie... you wouldn't let anyone come in your house who you don't know anything about.  And we all have house rules in our homes because we don't want people tearing up our houses.

One thing that I wish I had known was that you shouldn't be over zealous in accepting petitions and to verify petitions to see if they reflect what your community is about.

7. Was there anything else you'd like to add?

I find that the Spruz Community Forum is very helpful and everyone is very nice and courteous. Thanks Spruz!

In order to keep up with the growing needs of our user base we have completed some upgrades at our datacenter that expands over all capacity and should improve the performance.

You will hopefully notice overall faster load times and pages should be more snappy.

Please comment to let us know if you feel things are running slower or faster as we continue to tweak our new hardware and configurations.

With our affiliate program you will earn cash for referring people to use the Spruz Social Website Platform.

The referral program has been designed to be very rewarding on multiple fronts. When a member signs up to Spruz using your referral link you will receive a percentage of their payments to Spruz for the life of their account.

• You get paid anytime a person you referred makes a payment to us for premium services.
• Earn a 20% revenue share from any payment made by your referrals.
• Earn an Additional 5% revenue share on people referred by affiliates that have been referred by you.
• Get Paid Fast! You can withdraw your commissions at anytime to be paid via Paypal.
• Special Affiliate discount promo codes that you can give to customers you refer that will give them 10% off upgrades and flag the account as your referral. This allows you to pick up referrals even if they haven't clicked your referral like.

Referral Example:

A person you referred signs up for an account, then 3 months later they upgrade their service to a $19.95/mo plan. You will earn $3.99 for that payment, and each payment made for the life of that account. Thus in one year that person would pay $239.40 and your share would be $47.88.

Affiliate Referrals Example:

A person you referred signs up to our affiliate program becomes your second tier referral commisions. Your Affiliate refers 20 people that upgrade into $9.95/mo plans. In one year you would earn $477.66 from their referrals.

The Goal of this program is to reward those of you that want to help promote Spruz as a strong solution for creating niche social networks for groups, and business. The Discount Promotion Code should really useful for Developers out their that use the Spruz platform for their clients, special thanks to WebWizco AKA The NingMaster for suggesting this extra feature.

To get started go to the Spruz.com website and login. Next click on Account, then the Affiliate Program Link

We have recently completed a round of updates that make the following adjustments and changes to the platform;

• The tags field on blogs has been increased in length by 3 times, allowing more room for tags.
• The Profile Blog Element on Member Profiles has a new View All link located at the bottom that does a search of all blogs posted by them in the Blogs page.
• New more Friendly Profile URLs! This was a top requested item for more friendly profile URLS within the site, when you click on a link to profile it will be /profile/membername/. The member name information was generated when someone first registered on account within the Spruz platform. If they want to update their profile URL have them go to change display name and just hit the submit button. The profile address is based on the members display name.
• When changing your account email address we no longer require you to re-enter your password to complete the process.
• New Option Section on profiles added,  we have moved the Add Friend and Message links from right below the member profile photo to this new section and added the links for Editing Profile Information, Settings, Changing Display Name, Etc. We had allot of feedback from people that found it difficult to add a friend or send message, plus makes the core account options and inviting friends easier to find and access.
• Featuring and Approving Member options has been added to the new member profile options block on profile pages, if you have admin access on profile pages you will see a feature and approval/decline option on account profiles. This allows your profile admins to approve member accounts now, thus there may be people you want to give access to approve members but you don't want them to have full access on the website.
• We have improved Language support with new Page Character Set option, the character set controls how a page returns the characters of a page. This is very useful our site creators from other countries as this helps with the displaying of text and symbols required by other languages. The character set can be changed by going to the Website Settings page and is the new option added to the very bottom of the website information tab.
• We have added style code to restrict the size of embedded video on the videos page. This way they all display in a uniform size.
• Plus we have fixed a range of bugs that people have reported via support tickets.

As always if you encounter a problem, issue or something that keeps you from effectively using your website with us, please open a support ticket to tell us about it!

Have a great weekend!

Hello everyone! We're back again with our Community Spotlight, which brings something you'll probably recognize and something you won't.

I just wish I had known about Spruz sooner than what I did.  BUT! I'm glad to be here, now.