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Tips for maintaining a
successful online forum Nothing promotes a business
online better than staying in touch with prospects. The more interactive
the continued contact, the more of a relationship that is built with a
potential client.
This business principle of continued contact and business relationship
building has given rise to the popularity of online business forums, and
of course, "theme-related" online forums. Online forums quickly
establish empathy, set forum owners up as "experts" in the eyes of
visitors, and serve as a promotional vehicle for other products and
services that forum owners seek to sell.
While online forums are popular and the perfect method of relationship
building, starting a forum and maintaining one can be challenging,
especially in the beginning when members can be "few" and "far between".
The challenge for most new forum owners is to get beyond the initial
start up phase and move onto a phase where the forum members themselves
promote the forum simply by posting.
Although each forum is individual and personal, a few general guidelines
should be followed or at least kept in mind when starting and
maintaining an online forum. These are as follows:
1. Take care when choosing the type of forum and forum script or
software that will be used. The forum should be easy to access, easy to
use, and come with "visitor- friendly" features. All visitors should be
made to feel welcomed and find the navigability of the forum, user
friendly. Forum scripts and software, especially "free" varieties, may
be overburdened with ads from the parent company and lead to a poor
experience for visitors.
Some recommendations:
http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.vbulletin.com/
2. The forum should have a good number of interesting and focused
topics. The content should reflect the interests of the target audience,
and every care should be made to have well-written and informative
content that is updated regularly. This not only helps attract new
members, it keeps older members from losing interest and defecting to
other forums.
3. The forum should be Search Engine friendly. High activity forums,
like popular blogs, provide a great reason for Search Engines to visit
them frequently as they are brimming with fresh content all the while.
Dynamic urls, session ids, etc. used by most forum software can be very
detrimental to the forum health from Search Engine point of view.
When selecting a forum software, check if they are Search Engine
friendly. Open source software like phpbb, have mods (modifications)
developed by third party sources, to enhance the forum in many ways.
Here's a great mod for phpbb to make it Search Engine friendly:
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html
4. The forum needs to have a clear list of rules, a disclaimer, and most
of all, good solid moderation. Visitors will quickly become frustrated
with forums that have no clear guidelines, or feature rude, obnoxious,
or overbearing members. Good manners are required as much online as
offline.
5. Promotion, especially in the early days, will take considerable time
and effort. Forums can be difficult to start (members generally are
"shy" when there are only a few present), and the more posts that take
place, the more individuals will join. This is a "snowball" effect of
forums, so marketing must be done consistently, day in and day out,
until the forum becomes more self-sustaining.
6. The owner of the forum should take an active interest in the forum
and SHOW this interest by contributing regularly. Above all else, people
join forums where they feel they will learn from the owner of the forum,
and if the owner is never present, they quickly lose interest in the
forum.
7. The forum should be targeted, yet diverse, encouraging older members
to contribute, without making newer members feel uncomfortable. Cliques
can form in forums, and this type of behavior should be discouraged by
the owner and moderators. Every effort should be made to answer
questions or comments by all members as quickly and thoroughly as
possible.
8. As with all other Internet related ventures, care needs to be given
as to hosting and maintenance of the forum. A forum that is always
experiencing "downtime", will lose members quickly, and a forum that has
many coding mistakes will quickly frustrate visitors. As with Web sites,
"cheap" providers of hosting and maintenance are not always "better".
All in all, online forums can be a great way to generate income, develop
a good reputation among clients, and provide entertainment and
instruction for many individuals. Like with everything else, however,
they take marketing savvy, and a great deal of time and attention to
detail. The old saying, "You only reap what you sow" really applies to
the world of online forums.
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