Have you considered adding a Community Forum to your website? There are many advantages to adding this type of content.
For one, it is an easy way to provide an interactive experience for your visitors. Lots of people surf the internet looking for information about a topic and many sites offer it in the way of articles or blog posts related to their niche.
However, if there is a forum available, many times visitors will stop, sign up, and begin chatting with others, ask questions, and compare notes. The longer they stay on your site, the greater the chances that they will return and possibly make a purchase.
Forums are also great venues for viral promotion. A positive forum experience is one that will be shared with others of like interests. This will drive traffic to your site and increase your page rank. This increased traffic is already prequalified, as well.
A Community Forum Equals Free Marketing
Perhaps the best thing about adding a Community Forum to your site is that there are many options to do so for free. Check first with your web hosting service to see if they offer an easy add-on. If not, there are several companies you can find online which offer free software downloads. Popular forums include SMF and PHP BB and a common standard if you’re willing to invest in a forum is vBulletin.
Even if you only have a WordPress blog, you can still add a community forum. How you do so will depend largely on the theme template you are using. The greatest challenge will be integrating your theme into the bulletin board software you select. The great thing is that there are quite a few open source forum software downloads available with large user bases willing to provide tips.
When you are looking for software downloads and forum plug-ins, compare the customisation options and the ability to make the forum match the design and layout of your site. Take a look at the administrator panel, as well. The more tasks you can automate, the less time it will take to administer the forum.
Some Considerations When Adding A Forum
Before you proceed to add a forum to your site, understand that managing and moderating it is going to take some time. Remember that just because you build it, does not mean that visitors will come. You have to promote your forum to the world and do your best to attract users.
Often, visitors will be put off if no one else has already posted so you may need to get the ball and conversations rolling creatively. Posting contests and giveaways can be a good way to get the ball rolling and you can often find professional forum posters that you can hire and pay per post to get things moving for you.
Once you’ve got a core group of users in place, you will want to monitor and manage them. Someone will have to act as moderator for the group to ensure that inappropriate posts or comments are not allowed and that new users are made to feel welcome. This will require that the moderator receive alerts when new users, posts, and threads are detected.
Depending on the software you use you can have moderation tools built right in that help you set user groups and permissions for users. If your forum becomes popular, the community will care about its well-being so you’ll have a good chance of getting help from the community. You might even have volunteers offer to be moderators for free.
Forum Spam
Controlling spam in these forums is important, particularly once you’ve got some interested users in place. If community members encounter posts containing obvious spam, it will not be long before you lose them and all of your promotion efforts. Spam can happen through signature links as well as images and content in the body of a post. Be sure to post your rules on your site and to regularly check for spam.
Adding a Community Forum to your website or blog is a great way to build credibility, provide an interactive experience for visitors, and increase your visibility to search engines. Viral promotion and SEO will occur naturally and forum SEO tends to be very good as search engine spiders visit regularly due to the constant posting of new content for the m to crawl.
You can monetise your forum, and a lot of people know that their signature can bring their site SEO results, so people love to post on forums which will bring your site more traffic and more recognition.
