Promoting Your Site by Establishing a Forum - Success Factor Three - The Big "Mo" (-mentum, That Is!)
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The momentum at the beginning is crucial. Many times, a forum will make an impression as if it is becoming successful but, in effect, it starts dying down after the first wave of members' posts and enthusiasm.
Before this stage, is can be fruitful to detect key members in the community and offer them premium rights and responsibilities. The classic example is to offer a responsible, knowledgeable, motivated member to be a moderator of an unmanned forum category. Moderators are rarely paid but they can gain experience as well as enhance their public relations and networks. Another way to praise moderators is to simply use the power of the forum to compliment them in front of their audience. This can empower and motivate them to continue their new leading roles in the community.
Asking initial members to invite their relevant friends and colleagues is also highly recommended. Incentives in the forms of contests, riddles and promotions could be integrated as well.
Another way of maintaining the initial momentum is to optimize the thread pages of your forum. First, you can choose category titles that are not exactly identical to the typical category titles of many other similar forums. Sometimes a slight tweak in keywords can help you position a forum category in top SERP's for a second-most popular search phrase while all other competitors are targeting the most popular term (in other words, find your niche). Second, use your SEO skills to optimize titles, descriptions, headings, texts and internal links of forum threads. Third, increase the link popularity of the threads by submitting them to directories, offering them to link partners and including them in other relevant threads and articles (ex:. 'check out what GoogleGuy said about'.')
Next: Finally, Once Established >>
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