Benefits of starting a forum community on your website
Forums and online communities are excellent additions to
websites that make them interesting and informative. Forums
provide a means for your website's visitors to interact with one
another to discuss about anything they wish, or about products
and services you are offering. With human activity on your
forums, visitors are more inclined to stay and interact with
other members. What your forum members post may be added content
to your website as they bring with them unique knowledge and
experiences which are added to your website, thus expanding your
offerings. Other visitors who are reading these forums may find
information useful and stay to learn more or join the forum in
order to ask the other members of the forum.
The most successful forums turn a website 'sticky'. A sticky
website is one in which surfers are interested in visiting over
and over again. One reason for the stickiness of a website is
the content available, and forums have information that is
updated frequently if members are very active. Visitors
transform from one-time browsers to residents and regulars of
the website just to check out what is new and what others have
to say. A "sticky" website also attracts more visitors as
members of your forum grow with the community and spread your
website's URL to friends and contacts. This word-of-mouth
marketing is priceless and can very often generate a lot of
traffic to your website with almost zero costs. These new
visitors who become members then continue to spread the word
about your forum community and very soon you would have a
thriving community that supports and feeds your website with new
traffic.
In addition to turning a website sticky so that visitors come
back often to find new information and content, forums offer
additional content that may improve your search engine ranking.
As every webmaster knows, a tremendous amount of traffic can
come from a first position ranking in the search engines such as
Google, Yahoo or MSN. These 3 search engines account for almost
100% of the web-searches done by people on the net. Being ranked
number one for the search term that your site is optimized for,
such as the keyword "sports shoes" will almost ensure that
everyone who searches for that keyword would click on the first
returned result from the search engine and land on your website.
If your website sells sports shoes, you can almost guarantee
that that tremendous amount of traffic can be turned to huge
sales and revenues. So by adding a forum where members can
discuss sports shoes on your website, you are generating content
related to "sports shoes". These content pages are then indexed
by search engines and increase the number of pages that your
site has on the search engine. With such relevant content, other
sites linking to your content and the content itself will aid in
your climbing of the search engine rankings.