Promoting Your Site by Establishing a Forum - Success Factor Two - Initial Traffic
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If the best leader in the world lives alone on a stranded island, a successful community will never exist. This implies that in order to establish a successful forum, you not only need successful forum leadership, but also initial traffic of potential community members.
If the site is just starting out, an email to friends, family members, and colleagues may be in order. Additionally, tools that track potential link exchanges can be used to detect Webmasters who may be interested in joining your forum. In fact, they might even invite the audience of their sites to participate in your forum! Because of this, articles may be written, optimized, and published yours or another site. Perhaps those articles present a controversial topic, or maybe they're just a direct invitation to talk about a presented topic at the forum.
Initial traffic can be increased if you take into consideration the different user behaviors of forum members. Each member is unique, but they can also be grouped according to the level of their interaction within the forum community. One group is the 'heavy users' who will write frequently and initiate new topics. A second group is the 'shy group' or 'learning beginners,' who only read forum posts without ever actively participating. There are other types as well and it would be beneficial for you to identify the types of groups in your forum. Why' At times, different communication approaches should be used in order to communicate the different groups. For example, a survey can be used to invite members of the 'shy group' to make their first steps in actively participating in the community. This enables the shy members' participation without requiring them to write long, meaningful messages to a group of people that they still don't feel comfortable with.
Finally, if you already have a website and are adding a forum to it, it is recommended to have a direct invitation to the forum in a noticeable spot on the homepage. The same goes for a newsletter.
Next: Success Factor Three - The Big "Mo" (-mentum, That Is!) >>
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