Increase Web Site Traffic with Discussion Forums
By Praveen Kumar | Website Promotion |
Rating:
You may have heard this before, "Content is King". Unfortunately, not many of us have the resources that Yahoo! does and we simply cannot create enough content to keep our visitors from coming back over and over again. Of course, there are many techniques you can use to generate content and thus increase returned traffic to your site. In this article, I will focus on forum.
What the heck is a forum?
A forum is known by many names, for instance, message board, discussion board, bulletin board, and for you old timers, BBS. In the simplest sense, a forum allows users to start topics of discussion revolving around a theme and anyone can reply to these topics by posting their own messages.Why should I bother with a forum?
Forum is very powerful because it enable the creation of a community where people can share their thoughts. Unlike chat, email, or instant messaging, content in a forum is persistent. A user can read information posted days or years in the past and add their thought to it. As such, once a forum become self-sustaining, it will generate more content than you can ever produce on your own. Since so many people contribute to a forum, your users will come back over and over again to see what other people have to say, and sometimes post their own messages to share with others.How can I add a forum to my web site?
The easiest way to add a forum to your web site is to shop around for pre-made scripts that will suit your needs. There are two kinds of needs that we have to consider here:- Features needs - There are so many forums out there and their features varies. The best way to find the right forum software for you is to do a Google search for the term "{topic of interest} forum" (i.e., "web design forum" or "bicycling forum"). Visit a few of these sites, sign up as a member, read some posts, and post some messages. This way you can see what features you like or don't like about that particular software. Once you find the forum software that you like, you can look at the footnote area to see what software they are running. It usually says "power by: ...".
- Hosting needs - Once you find the perfect software, you may find that your current host does not support the technology needed. For instance, a lot of forum software requires MySQL database. In this case, you have two choices: find another software that work with your host, or find another host that works with your software.
If your host does support MySQL, I highly recommend phpBB or vBulletin. In any case, here are some of my favorite resources for finding software scripts:
If you need to find a new host, this is probably the only link you will need: HostSearch.com
Ok, the forum is up and running, but nobody is posting
Setting up a forum is probably the easiest part. Once you have it up and running, you may think: "Hmm, I wonder if the software is working. May be it isn't. May be that's why nobody is posting..." Heh, welcome to the club. Fortunately, I have already gone through this miserable experience and I will share with you 11 Ways To Increase Forums ActivitesAbout the Author:
Pinyo Bhulipongsanon is the owner of GreatNexus.com Webmaster Resources offering visitors with features such as webmaster forums, webmaster directory, webmaster dictionary, programming scripts, and webmaster articles.
Visit his web site for more webmaster and SEO articles, or to submit your article.