Benefits of adding a Forum to Your Website.

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What is a Forum?

You'll have almost certainly seen them before and you might know them as
discussion boards, message boards, notice boards, bulletin boards or other names.

They enable people in your industry or niche to interact with your website and post questions and answers or just plain write articles.

Why bother with a forum?
I've jotted some reasons down below but primarily because you'll get more business!

Get more Traffic.
Search engines like forums because they contain relevant content are are updated
regularly and so are re-indexed often.
More traffic = More potential customers

Get more RETURNING traffic.
Half the battle on the web is getting people to return to your website as often as possible. This helps develop familiarity and trust.

A forum will help do this because people want to see what the response their questions and answers. Or even just because they want to stay updated in general.
This breeds loyalty and brand awareness.

Get more Inbound Links.
As your forum develops more content and become more valuable to your community, more and more inbound links will appear from other people's websites, blogs and indeed notice boards.
More Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

Market Research.
Because people in your industry can interact with the site, you get to see directly what your people are interested in and what's hot and what's not.

In response, you can react accordingly and adjust your website or even business to start offering what they want. In markets where products and services evolve quickly this can be invaluable in staying ahead of the trends.

Ongoing Development.
the way to continually learn and develop your understanding of your marketplace is to continually immerse yourself in it and a forum is a great way to do this.

You'll learn things you didn't know and develop a greater understanding of things that you already do know. No-one knows everything and getting other people's advice and opinions (for free!) is invaluable.

Keyword Research.
As the forum is usually about your industry, the content of it can be a goldmine of key phrases that you might not have thought about to use to attract more niche search
traffic. It's the ultimate feedback - you're giving the search engines exactly what people are interested in!

If you do nothing else, just having the keywords on the forum itself will attract more traffic anyway for these key phrases.

Give People what They WANT.
The key to generating business online is to give people what they want not just try and sell to them. A forum does just that - it gives them the information they want or offers them the opportunity to ask for it directly!

Be seen as an industry Leader.
Rather than having 'just another website' the same as everyone else, you'll be seen
as the pro-active leader in your field that people will refer to.

The people who get ahead aren't necessarily the ones that know everything about their industry, they're the ones that share what they know about their industry.

Capture Contact Details
Typically, people have to register to join a forum, so you'll gain their email address and name. With this, you'll be able to email directly with forum members once they've joined the forum and consequently you'll be able to communicate with them more and sell more.

Additionally, as they'll have heard of you by now, they'll be MUCH more likely
to buy from you than if they were 'cold'.

Communicate More = Sell More.

Networking opportunities.
Message boards can be a fantastic way of developing networking opportunities with customers, suppliers and other people in your industry that you might want to joint venture with.

You can promote other people's products or better still, encourage other people to sell your products.

Add Interactivity to your Website.
People like interactivity. Interactivity brings people closer to your website and psychologically makes them more involved with it and ultimately you. Forums are a way of encouraging interactivity and lets visitors not feel as though they're being 'sold to'.

Many hands make Light Work
A lot of the Hard work is done for you! By having lots of other people add content to your website by using the forum, you website gets more content and develops and you don't have to create all the articles and content yourself!

Now I can See why a Forum is so Powerful - How do I get One?

I use a freely available bit of software call PHPBB.
A free forum program you can use(if you web server supports PHP)
is PHPBB.

It's free and the most widely used forum software on the web.
Visit http://www.phpbb.com/ to download it. You can also register for a hosted forum if you want where you won't have to bother installing the software yourself.

Would you like more Internet Marketing Tips?

- Checkout http://www.mklink.com/training/ today.

'till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips