Can a site really benefit from having a discussion board added to it? Well, to answer that we have to first work out what the general aim of a site is and how a forum can aid that.
The aim of any site is to generate commerce for its owners. Whether it straightforwardly generates business such as an online retailer, or whether it generates business through generating enquires, such as my own web design business, or whether it is in itself a business to display paid adverts, contain sponsored posts and so on, as a web site owner you are trying to generate some sort of visitors to the site to encourage business coming your way.
This is the key to any web site, whether large or small. You want a regular supply of people arriving on your site, reading various pages and completing your cash making aspect of the web site. Whether that is someone clicking on pay per click adverts or buying your product does not matter. Converting to a completed action is impossible without a good flow of visitors.
You can keep paying for sponsored adverts on Google and paying search engine optimisation experts to keep you on the top page of Google, but this just gets people onto your web site. There are huge benefits to your commerce if you can encourage these people to return to your website of their own accord and even able to get them to entice more visitors to your web site.
And this is where a forum can come in very useful. If you can send some relevant visitors over to your forum they can start to take part in your web site. By taking part, they are making it more budding that they will come back in the future. Also, by taking part, they are creating more content on your site. This is new, fresh content that the search engines will see and know that your web site is fresh. It is also more content that search engines may notice keywords in and start to send you traffic directly.
So, how can people take part in a discussion board? Well, your forum may just be a general discussion around what is going on currently in your niche, or it can be a question and answer type discussion board. As a question and answer format, either you or other members can provide the answers.
All of this means that traffic are posing questions and making statements that other people will reply to. Once these replies are made, the original person who asked the question will return to see what the reply said. It creates a community aspect to your website, so that traffic go from a visitor to a member of the web site community. They will start to consider your website as one of the websites they visit frequently when they want to knwo something or to ask discuss latest developments.
This is great - once they are involved they will then be clicking on adverts more and more potential to buy from you when they need your products. What could be better?
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Written by Keith Lunt of janric.co.uk . If you want to read more original marketing ideas, pop in to our marketing blog today!
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