my weekend
Sunday, den 6. July 2008Last weekend, I finally got round to clearing my wardrobe and tucking away all my maternity clothes accumulated during that year of my pregnancy. My work at home schedule is usually saturated with work and parenting with little emphasis on home improvement. There are many things that I’d like to get done but time has [...]
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Do you need a forum?
Sunday, den 6. July 2008Forums are best examples of Crowdsourcing. And a successful forum can do miracle in respect to sales generation or product development. And a good forum is so powerful that you can even ignore search engines to send you traffic.
Though this is the final output that you expect from a successful forum, there are some interesting features worth mentioning.
The most interesting feature of a forum based community is that, you do not need to worry about content generation at all. When the ball starts rolling general people (the participants) will write about your domain (forum topics) and they will keep the site running with fresh content.
And that is not all.
In any business development process, the most important aspect is “understanding the need of the target market”. As forums are the best place to discuss on general and developing problems of common people, seasoned marketers can easily identify the trend and the need.
Apart from that, people keep the board updated with the latest problems which is almost impossible to determine by a small team that actually run a website.
And there should be no doubt about wisdom of crowd - just think about Wikipedia or any wiki based platform and you have the answer. Just think about it - why wordpress is the best blogging solution? And also think why Blogger (even after being a product by Google - famous for developing the best and most successful web applications) or other blogging applications are legging much behind wordpress!
However, there are some primary conditions that you must maintain to develop a successful forum.
The most important condition is to develop a non-profit identity. This is the easiest and the most important way to develop a successful forum based community. When I say non-profit identity I do not mean that you should not sell any product - on the contrary you should let them take the decision. And that’s not all - you should keep everything clear to the visitors, members and contributors. You must take the audience into confidence.
Another proven way is to show them some financial output to be there - a lot of SEO and web development forums are successful because of freelance job board. There people provide quality content to develop their identity. You must know the attitude of your visitors - what they expect from you. A lot of successful forums offer redeemable points for each worthy post. And this is a win-win situation for both of them.
However, one last open question for you to think - Web Master World or Digital Point is already there - why should someone join your Forum on SEO or Web Development!
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