When it comes to marketing a website, most companies simply focus on driving traffic using mediums such as SEO, PPC or advertising. This is a great start and it often generates tremendous revenue, but it’s just scratching the surface.
If you really want to see your website traffic (and revenue) take off, you need to give your visitors a reason to come back over and over again. The helps to develop a group of brand evangelists who will talk about your company to other like-minded people. Over time, this can become a rather large group of people who help to create an increasing amount of exposure for your company and your website. When properly executed, this can grow exponentially.
One of the easiest ways to encourage people to come back to your website more frequently is to launch a forum on your website. In most industries, once a forum gains a bit of traction, it can quickly become an “industry hub” where all the top experts congregate and other people go when looking for answers. With an active forum on your website, you will have a powerful asset that encourages repeat traffic, motivates visitors to contribute relevant content, improves organic search traffic and puts your website in a more easily defensible position.
If you want to see an example of a forum in action, we’ve recently added Wildfire Marketing Forum to our own website. We still have some minor bugs to work out over the next few days, so bear with us if you run into any problems.
Before you jump headfirst into this, keep in mind, it’s going to take some work getting everything in place, and then you’ll need to maintain it. You’ll need to be active on your forum, making regular posts, responding to other people’s posts and deleting spam. The maintenance alone can easily take a few hours a week or more, but it’s well worth the effort. There are several software options, but the only two we recommend are phpBB, which is completely free, and vBulletin, which is a bit more robust and is priced at $180 per domain. Both have active support communities where you can find answers to just about any question you may have about the software, and vBulletin even offers paid telephone support.
