Start a Forum

By starting a forum you can quickly build a targeted audience, share knowledge and market your product and services. Forums do an exceptional job of allowing a conversation to take place with customers at all levels and at the same time providing an archive for future customers to reference. By starting a forum you allow customers who are new to your product or service to read through previous conversations. Allowing time to catch up to everyone else by reading archived messages establishes a safe place for them to ask any questions they may have about your product or service.

Forums can be a stand alone site or an extension of your existing site. For example if you wanted to provide product sport and answer questions you could quickly add a forum in a sub directory of your existing site. You can also choose a less direct method and create a new site where the forum itself is the entire site. Let’s take a look at both methods.

Forum as an Extension

If you have a product or service it may make sense to have a forum as an extension to your site. This enables users to ask questions, gain support and provide viable feedback of wants and needs.

When I go looking for new product or service if I can see the presence of a forum that is well populated and active that is a sign that if I do not like the product or have problems with it I can quickly get support. This can be the difference between generating a sale at losing a sale. By publicly addressing the wants and needs of your customers you convey a strong message to new visitors about your product or service support. A marketing strategy or discount code can be that much more effective when combined with a visibly active forum.

Forum as a Stand Alone Site

In many cases it makes sense to start a forum as its own site. For example the business that is looking to get user feedback, new ideas or keep their fingers on the pulse of the industry may find it useful to avoid combining their product/service site with the forum. Avoiding the hard sell of their products and creating a safe place for users to carry on conversations may provide usefull information that would not have been available otherwise. By creating a separate site that is not associated with a product or service you now remove yourself as the authoritative figure and allow knowledgeable people within that industry to speak up and share information. Sometimes they are you competitors that end up sharing a bit more than they should!

When your forum has reached critical mass and is self-sustaining (meaning you no longer have to seed conversation topics) you can then start trickling in marketing for your product or service as a site sponsor. When all is said and done you will now have created a community of people who continue to provide you feedback about a product or service and can activley market and brand you product or service to. You can choose to create several accounts to ask as many questions as you need and can create forum rules to curtail users who over promote competitive products or services.

Organizing the Unorganized

The concept of organizing the unorganized and leveraging the community it creates to generate conversions for your product or service is often overlooked. Sure its a bit of work but When using forums you create your own community that enables you to cause marketing and puts you on the path to being less dependent on costly alternative marketing campaigns. If the community you are targeting is underserved by existing forums or nonexistent act quickly to establish a forum. By doing so it puts you in a position of power over your competitors that will have no choice but to market on your forum or sponsor it.

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