If You Build It, Will They Come?

Putting a forum on your site can be a great way to create a community around your products or services. Heck, you might even learn a thing or two from your customers. But if you’re the only person posting in the forum, it can quickly become the loneliest place in the world. I recently set up a forum for a venture I’m working on, and am now in the process of trying to build a community. I’ve done it before, so hopefully I can do it again. In this blog I thought I’d pass on some pointers which may come in useful if you intend to start a forum for your own company.

Forums can be used for more than getting help and advice. There is often so much activity on certain forums that a normal forum-less Web site can only dream of. While you can help other members and ask for help on the discussion forums, you can also tap into the abundant traffic of forums and drive it back to your blog.

Think minimalist. To get the ball rolling, limit the number of forum topics on your site to, say, around five. If you find yourself coming up with many different forum subjects, try and group them together under one forum. Then in that forum you can create individual topic posts to cater to each area. That way you are creating conversation starters and making the place look a little busier. As the forums grow and you have enough individual entries to start breaking down forums you can justify creating new ones. You can then move the existing topics into the appropriate categories and the forum doesn’t start off empty.

Start a ‘passionate’ discussion with another member. And by this I don’t mean you start a nasty kind of argument or discuss what each of you are wearing. Just a normal debate between you and another member where you quote each other and try to disprove your opponents’ claim or point of view. When a debate starts in a particular thread between two members, other members usually don’t interfere. But this doesn’t mean they are not reading. They silently read the debate and derive their own conclusions.

Become an active member. As the site owner you MUST actively participate in all its discussions, even though it’s hard to keep motivated when week after week you create new topics and try to stimulate conversation and you seem to be talking to yourself. Get into a routine of making a few posts everyday and try to be the first one to reply to a new thread. Always be eager to offer help and advice to fellow members. And be welcoming to the new members. This will definitely get other members to appreciate your help and altruism and have them wanting to know more about you and your company.

Go incognito. I’m not proud of this tip, but it’s essential to get the ball rolling. This little trick lets you stimulate conversation by creating a few different member accounts, each with their own personality. You can even have full forum conversations between your characters (just don’t go insane!). Only you know which characters are fake, to everyone else it appears as if your forum is getting popular. Just treat it like forum acting. Once your forum grows you can revert back to being just you.

Drop links to your products or services in the posts. Not in a spammy way, though, because if you drop links without establishing yourself as an active and helpful member first, you’ll be ignored or worse - you may drive away customers. If you are already seen as an authority member on the forum, no one would object to your occasional link dropping. Why not link to a few special offers and such like, to make your forum readers feel like they are getting a scoop?

The most important tip I can give you to grow your community is to not give up. Once you’ve built a popular forum you’ll have the best advertising tool you could ever have - you now have an audience that you can either leverage around your own products or services or start to derive revenue from through advertising, premium services or subscriptions.