What benefits could a forum give to a website? Is it only creating a headache for yourself as you try to get rid of spammers, or are there real hard reasons for using a forum? There might be a good reason for using one that you might have overlooked, we look at that.
Getting More Traffic To Our Web-sites
Virtually all web-sites on the internet can do with a bit more visitors and gaining ample more visitors is the goal of a load of website owners’ desire. For this, there are two ways of improving your traffic. First and most obvious to most people are the array of methods used to get more people visiting your site, for instance search engine optimisation, pay per click adverts and so on.
The second method of ensuring more visitors is missed by masses of owners as it sounds too daft – this is making the most of the visitors that you are getting arriving onto your website. Obviously, this implies that people are finding and visiting your site one way or another. You cannot make the most of them on a brand new website, with undeniably no visitors!
There are lots of ways of making the most of the traffic that are arriving on your website, from improving navigation and so on, but one of the better ways, with a lot of advantages, is by running a forum on your website.
What Is A Forum?
A forum is just an simple way for traffic who are coming to your site of sharing their thoughts. A forum might be used in several ways. The most basic is for it to be a method of traffic communicating with each other and communicating whatever they are feeling at the time. This should be monitored by yourself to check what is being said. But a forum can also be used as a very useful question and answer area, where traffic might ask you questions and you then reply.
Whichever way you decide to use a forum, the benefits are the same.
The Benefits Of A Forum
1) You are building an amount of unique content on your site, that search engines will take an interest in and hopefully cause people searching the interenet to find your forum and then hopefully for some of these to then become buying customers of your main website.
2) You are building loyalty and repeat visits to your web site, because people make their post and then want to come back later to read what other answers and replies are given, This causes them to not only become a member by signing up, but to actually feel like a member and part of your site. Then, when they are ready to buy services, they are more impending to be loyal to you.
And it is this second benefit, increasing the amounts of visits that each customer makes to your site and from that their loyalty to you that is so beneficial.
To Recap
So, while it is true that use forums on our websites as there is a search engine benefit of creating ample of unique content that could contain search terms people are looking for, the biggest reason is that we are creating a brand loyalty factor and encouraging one off traffic to our web sites to come back again in the future. Much cheaper and simpler than trying to find the equivalent number of new buying visitors.
