8 Tips for Starting and 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.
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.
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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