Hosting Your Own Forum – The Benefits
by Danny Brown on December 10th, 2007
The Internet plays such an important part in a business’s success these days that getting the site right is as important as having a strong sales team. After all, if you get your site set up properly, you can almost automate your sales process. However, there are more ways than one to online success, and one of these is by hosting your own forum.
If you use the Internet regularly, you might be a member of a forum yourself. Perhaps you’re in a sports forum, discussing the latest football scores. Or maybe a consumer forum, where you exchange tips on the latest products. Either way, if you have ever participated in a forum, you’ll know how useful they can be for exchanging views, and recommending companies. So why not host your own forum and make that kind of “silent advertising” work for you?
Forums and Marketing
Apart from allowing your clients, staff or visitors a place to go and discuss your latest deals, offers, queries, etc, hosting your own forum offers a great marketplace for your company. Since it can be an area where comments can be left openly, a forum gives you a great insight into what your business is doing right or wrong.
For example, an employee might be too shy to raise a suggestion to you at work, thinking you’re too busy. However, that same suggestion can be placed in a forum where others can either back support it, or suggest where it could be improved even further. The anonymity of forums allows open discussion, so where better to get the true feel of how your company is perceived?
On top of that, forums can be an excellent place to get a feel for a new product or service of yours. Because the forum members already have an interest in your company or products, they can offer free feedback, and save you money from focus group testing. This type of feedback will help you refine your product until it’s fully ready to market, and this can only help you in the following sales campaign.
Yet another great reason to host your own forum – user-generated content! If you want to implement a content strategy for your website as part of your SEO efforts, forums are an excellent way to add content without having to write it yourself. It’s all posted by the members of your forum – product information and discussions, buying advice…the list goes on.
How to Host your own Forum
Now that you see how important a forum can be to your success, you need to make sure that any forum you host is done properly, and maintains the interest of its members. It’s relatively straightforward, but you do need to make sure it’s maintained regularly. Other things to take into consideration are:
* Make sure you invite relevant people. If your forum is going to be used mainly as an additional promotion tool for your company, invite existing and potential customers. Also, keep it an open forum so other people can join from suitable companies.
* Create interesting forum topics. Have titles that will make people want to read, join in with, discuss, etc. Standard ones like “Latest News”, “Have Your Say” and similar will make sure people know that it’s an open forum where they are encouraged to participate.
* Monitor it well. The worst thing for any forum is to suddenly get an influx of spammers and hackers, especially as forums become more popular. Install security software that will deter this, and ensure you hand over any information to Internet security companies, if the problem persists.
A well-hosted forum can add a huge amount of visitors to a website, especially if your existing members are recommending it. A good example is the website Digg.com – although not exactly a forum as such, it still allows members to share their views and recommendations just like a normal forum. With the top recommendations having over 10,000 views, you can see why hosting your own forum can achieve similar results.
