Five Reasons to Add a Forum to Your Site
If you’ve ever participated in a successful online forum you’ve probably taken note of the number of regular participants and frequent traffic. Perhaps you’ve even wondered if adding a forum to your site would be beneficial. Here are some of the key reasons why you may want to consider this undertaking:
- Generate Traffic
Forums give users a reason to visit your site repeatedly. If the forum is active, users will want to follow up on responses to their posts as well as keep abreast of any new activity. They key to reaping this benefit is effectively directing a portion of the forum traffic to your main site.
- Building Loyalty
Users generally like to invest their money where they invest their time. A good forum will not only keep them coming back for updates, it will keep them coming back for your goods and services as well.
- Free Content – Search Engine Optimisation Boost
In a forum, your visitors generally create the majority of the content at no cost to you. If this is correctly linked to your main site, search engines will view this content as fresh content for your site. Frequently updated content leads to better results in the search engines.
- Free Help and Support
Forums provide an excellent place for users to ask and answer questions about your products and services. In essence, an online help system is being created organically. Since this is handled by your forum users there is no cost.
- Promotions
If you carefully monitor threads you will find opportunities to promote your goods and services. For example, if someone posts about a product not fully meeting their needs you could suggest the add-on component they were not aware, complete with a link for easy purchase. You can also create special campaigns targeted to your regular forum visitors.
There’s no question that these reason sound very appealing. However, before you decide to take the plunge into a forum make sure you consider the down side as well.
- Forums are Difficult to Establish
Forums do not become successful simply because they exist. You must spend a great deal of time upfront promoting your forum and grooming the initial content. Be prepared to enlist everyone you can think of to assist populating the forum. If visitors see there are very few posts they aren’t likely to stay long. If all goes well the forum will begin to manage itself but that could take months or even years.
- Not all Content is Good Content
Although it can be wonderful to give users a voice on your website your business could be damaged if disgruntled customers post too much negative content. Of course, you could moderate the content but this can be very time consuming. You will also have to contend with the host of spam that forums tend to get inundated with thanks to numerous spam bots.
- It’s All Been Done Before
You will have to be very cautious about your target audience when defining your forum. There are numerous forums on the Internet that are already well established. If there is already a popular forum dedicated to your topic it will be difficult to compete. You also must be wary of an overly targeted audience that results in a user base too small to support a forum.
