Monday 18 August 2008

Run a site forum for more repeat visitors!

I knew the 20 would become more than that before I finished!

A good way of getting plenty of traffic onto your site, whilst building fresh and unique content it to run a forum. This is especially good when you already have a list of regular visitors.

But why is a forum so good and what are the problems? Well, a forum is just people discussing whatever they want to. You as site owner set the topics to be discussed and act as a moderator. Whatever is on people's minds they can discuss and if it's on their minds, it could just be on other people's minds. If they are searching for this then they might find your site!

So how does it work as far as visitors are concerned? Well every thread that's started adds more content to the site that the search engines should index and send traffic to. Everyone posting on that thread will keep coming back to read replies and add further comments.

Sometimes posts will be a little controversial and will attract more people - through current visitors sending links to their friends and acquaintances. This is spreading the word of your website.

These visitors might not be adding directly to sales, but especially if you are displaying adverts then you are bringing in traffic that might be clicking on these adverts.

You are also developing a base of regular visitors. Some of these will sign up for your newsletters, others will browse your site and start to buy products and services. This is the aim! For just the cost of a forum and maintaining it, you have a continual stream of traffic.

You do need to appoint a moderator to watch for posts that go a little too far - but as long as visitors can flag posts then that shouldn't be a problem. And some people will try to fill posts with links to their websites. You either need to be checking for blantant self promotion or adding the tag rel="nofollow" to every hyperlink in posts.

There are plenty of off the shelf packages that can be installed or use a custom built one. Whereas a custom built solution might not have so many fancy features and can be a bit more basic, it can combine into the site far more effectively. For example, latest posts can be displayed in the header of every page on the website so that every visitor can see what's happening in the forum.

A forum is an excellent way of generating loads of unique, fresh content. With a little work it should really drive plenty of traffic into your site.

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