Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #49: Mak­ing a Mon­ey­mak­ing Forum

Al­ways, there is a need for us to at­tract cus­tomers and lead them to our site, giv­ing us traf­fic and, ide­ally, sales in the process. We can use dif­fer­ent strate­gies, but one of the best and in­no­v­a­tive ways to do this is to cre­ate your own fo­rum and lead.

Cre­at­ing a Forum

Many host­ing ser­vices now al­low you to cre­ate a fo­rum with a plu­gin. If you want to cre­ate one, you might want to check your web host to see if it of­fers a fea­ture that will al­low you to do this.

Once you cre­ated a fo­rum, you can sim­ply man­age the site through the con­trol panel, adding threads, man­ag­ing sticky notes, and delet­ing posts as you find necessary.

If you are think­ing that it will be rather easy to man­age your fo­rum one you have cre­ated it, you are mis­taken. The process can ac­tu­ally be rather tricky. You must also un­der­stand that it is un­likely that your fo­rum will be suc­cess­ful un­less you ded­i­cate a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time to the launch phase and try to ac­quire as much mem­bers as you can. You must also need to keep in mind that you have to con­tin­u­ously en­cour­age peo­ple to participate.

With­out ded­i­cat­ing suf­fi­cient time to your site, it will be hard to get it to go from a “ghost fo­rum,” where no new mem­bers join and much less post, to a fo­rum where there is lively ac­tiv­ity. What you want is a fo­rum teem­ing with life; make it one by be­com­ing a good ex­am­ple, post­ing reg­u­larly, an­swer­ing ques­tions, and so on.