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The Power of Forums

Jack Zeal, Lead Developer

The best website I use doesn't have the most spectacular Web 2.0 backend. The design is clunky and scattershot. It won't ship orders overnight. It doesn't have to. It became compelling as a quality source of content. It's a forum.

Although many companies are adopting blogs to make their internet offerings more of a two-way communication, businesses often hesitate to adopt forums. Sadly, they're avoiding one of the most powerful enhancements they can add to their sites.

Always Hold On To A Customer

Stickiness is a key to effective web marketing. You may think you only want customers coming to your site when they're ready to purchase. Wrong! By making your site appeal to customers throughout the buying cycle, it establishes your reputation and builds brand recognition well in advance of the purchase cycle.

Some companies have known this for a while. You've seen the corporate blog, the "send a friend a email postcard of our new product" and the promotional sweepstakes, all of which are intended to pull traffic from people outside the immediate pre-purchase phase. Forums are another tool in this arsenal, but they provide so much more-- credibility and targeted content.

Forums for Business

Businesses often fear forums because their uncensored nature could lead to dissatisfied customers venting in public. Even this "problem", if properly managed, can become an opportunity to improve your site. It's all about credibility. Customers will immediately disregard tables of glowing testimonials and happy clients. They were obviously cherry-picked. On a forum, users expect to see a cross-section of the community. Having a small number of dissatisfied customers posting (and getting their problems solved quickly) actually shows that the 99% of customers who are happy aren't the survivors of a censorship purge, giving their positive statements more credibility.

Forums for SEO

Search engine optimization experts have recently noticed the importance of avoiding "diluted" content on sites. If you build 30 pages on hats, then add five on ties, you've diluted the original hat content, which will probably cost you PageRank.

Forums are an excellent source of targeted content. People usually seek out forums explicitly for their targeted content, and their general attitude towards dismissing, or at least setting aside, off-topic content, provides a "self-policing" system which tends to produce a continually on-target supply of content.

Furthermore, a quality forum attracts inbound links, which will benefit your page's ranking. Search engine optimization often relies on buying or exchanging links in order to get your site onto well-regarded pages. The goal is to emulate the appearance of a site trusted third parties find useful. A forum which has become full of quality content will provide the real thing, without the risk of being caught on an unscrupluous SEO firm's "link farm" sites.

Building A Quality Forum Resource

To maximize the return on your forum investment, you need to ensure there's a flow of regular visitors. One way to ensure this flow is to provide a continual supply of new content for discussion. Something as simple as a "tip of the week" article series or a "What should we offer next?" discussion, or as elaborate as early access to product information and the development process, can give people a reason to start coming to your site regularly.

Providing this "teaser" information, however, is only a start. A forum dependent on an external source of content will die without constant, potentially costly, feeding. A good comparison can be seen in forums which discuss TV shows: once the series, the main source of discussion fodder, gets cancelled, the forum quickly wanes. Your real goal is to develop a "critical mass" of users and posts that will make the site compelling in its own right. A strong community can keep a discussion going far longer than a weak one.

Some forum operators have taken to offering contests with restrictions like "entrants must have 20 posts on our forum." While this looks like a solid way to build a base, it must also be recognized as what it is: a pay-per-click system. If you're giving out a $100 gift certificate in a contest that draws only 15 new posters to your site, odds are, direct pay-per-click advertising would have been cheaper. Conversely, if your business gives you access to desirable prizes cheaply, such as wholesale merchandise, or review samples, you may be able to "buy" participation with prizes for less than if you paid cash.

Believe it!

I've drawn a rosy picture of what forums can do for your site. But I can back my boasting. Consider the following example: Computer hobbyist site pcapex.com has numerous partner links and a wide variety of relevant news articles. Their main site earns a PageRank of 3 and about 4,500 backlinks on the 3 major search engines. However, their well-trafficked, lively forums have a PageRank of 5, and over 42,000 backlinks. As a side benefit, they have acquired registrations, including email addresses, of almost 14,000 users, providing a ready base for informational email campaigns. It's obvious that the forums are an asset to this site. Your site could experience similar benefits by developing a quality forum.