What kind of forum?
When thinking about making a website the decision to use a forum on it invariably comes up. After all, you’re providing a lot of good information so it’s only natural that readers are going to want to discuss the topic. If you decide to go this route make the forum look like the rest of the site, use it as a tool to discuss random thoughts you have that aren’t big enough to fill an entire article. You’ll want to downplay the importance of the forum at first (since no one will be using it). If you point to an empty forum at every chance you get returning readers will start to wonder just how many people actually read the site. When the forum starts to see a few posts per day then you can start to feature it more and more in your content.
Instead of writing a lot of content yourself you can make the forum the focal point on the site. This has some great advantages. The most obvious being that the readers of the site will generate 99% of the original content making your job a lot easier. Getting the users is the hard part. When choosing a forum site you’ll want to consider competitors, are there already forum sites out there that provide what you’re trying to provide?
If there are competitors that have a userbase already it’ll be hard to attract users to your site, why would they want to come to your forum when one full of knowledgable users and tons of information already exists?
You also want to decide what niche you’ll be in. The more specific the niche the easier it will be to attract users. Ever forum site that I’ve been to focuses on one specific thing whether the owner of the forum wants it to or not. As an example, a forum related to a specific car company – we’ll say Toyota, always ends up focusing on one specific car (or subset of cars) for that company. There may be boards to post about every make and model Toyota has ever made, but 99% of the posts on the board revolve around one make and model (or a subset of them if they’re similar). Don’t go through the trouble of making a forum that cuts a wide swath, you won’t attract users quickly and they’ll end up focusing on a subset of what you intended them to focus on anyways.
The advantage then is that if you pick a specific make and model for Toyota owners to view you’ll attract users quickly. You’ll also have a lot less work to do when making the site. Instead of making it to cater to any Toyota owner (since you don’t know what subset of boards will be used the most) you only have to cater to one vehicle. The disadvantage is that if your specific topic becomes obsolete (Toyota discontinues the vehicle) you won’t have any new interest in the site after a while.
If you decide to make the forum the centerpiece of your site there are some things to consider before doing so. Not many people actually sign up as users on forums, the number is well under 5% of incoming traffic. Of those, the percent of people that sign up for an account and then post on your forum on a regular basis is also really small, well under 5% again. So you’re talking about a userbase that is well under 1% of your total
traffic that will come and use it on a regular basis. The advantage of making your forum specific enough is that a lot of people will find it through search engines, especially if you don’t have any competitors.
How can you get this number up? Make the user click an authentication link in an email sent out to them. The link completes their registration process but could also point them to a ‘new user welcome’ board where you ask them to introduce themselves to the community. Most forum software freely availble today will have an option to notify users of a reply to a thread they’ve posted in, turn this on by default. The emails they’ll receive will remind them to visit your site more regularly and they’ll be more encouraged to post a reply.
