Jump-starting your forum community
Forums are an excellent addition to a website to attract
visitors to interact with the site and to return to the website
freqeuently. While there are many other website additions that
can retain visitors and have them coming back for more, forums
are perhaps the most engaging for visitors to your website and
offer the most benefits to both the website's owner and the
visitor.
Unfortunately, having a forum addition to a website does not
guarantee its success and usefulness in gathering the
hypothesized attention and attractiveness. A new forum with no
content, no members or no active discussion is like an empty
hall. Anyone who steps into such an empty room would most
definitely get the creeps and run away as fast as they can.
Similarly, your forum can quickly lose its purported usefulness
if it is empty and bare.
Starting and building an active forum on your website is no mean
feat. It requires a lot of time, patience, and hard-work. Why is
that so? Well, there are several important factors that scares
away visitors and you have to remove these factors in order to
convince visitors to stay, read, and then post and join in the
discussions. If there are no discussions in the first place, no
one would be around to discuss! It is exactly a chicken and egg
question that you have to answer. There are several methods to
overcome these issues and to get content/discussions started on
your forum.
1. Write good content and request feedback Having good content
draws visitors to read and if they have questions or concerns,
they can always find a link to discuss it on your forum. Make
sure you provide them a link and the outlet to voice out on your
forums. The hard part is in writing quality content on your site.
2. Offer free incentives Some forums offer active members
special advertising opportunities such as banners or text links
on the website and in the forums. Members are then encouraged to
start threads and post and participate in order to obtain free
advertising. Other than free advertising, you might want to
consider giving away a free copy of your product to the top
poster or hold a lucky draw for active posters. Nothing beats
promotion than free products and competition. On my webmaster community site
(www.buildtolearn.com), I provide free cpanel web hosting for
members who have accumulated 50 posts. This incentive has been
in use for the past 2 years and our community now has close to
10,000 members!
3. Exchange posts with other forums There are many other new
forums started on the net everyday and you could work together
with other websites to generate content on your forums. It is a
'I'll post in yours and you post in mine' exchange where both
webmasters participate in each others forums in order to get the
ball rolling in the forums. This exchange makes it more
interesting for both parties.
4. Pay for posts If you have deep pockets or have a budget from
your website, you can always get people to come to your forum
and start discussions. Quality checks are in order to ensure
that your 'free-lance posters' are not simply submitting 3 word
posts or copying posts from other forums.
5. Talk to yourself If all else fails, due to low budget or
having nothing else to offer, you can create 'virtual copies' of
yourself and start discussions with yourself. To new visitors to
your forum, they see an active community and discussions, which
helps them overcome the inertia. Once you have a handful of
active members talking, you can stop talking to yourself and let
your community grow itself!
The above are just some tips that I have gathered from
participating in forums and from building forum communities on
the net for the past 2 years. The tough part in setting up a
forum is in the initial stage. Once you have overcome that
hurdle, it gets easier for the forum to grow and mature.