Adding a Website Forum
Adding a Website Forum? Getting people to visit your website over and over again is what builds traffic and rankings. Making your website “sticky”, getting people to visit, put up their feet, stay a while and then come back the next day is the goal. It should not be that hard though. It is all about giving them a reason to come back. One way of accomplishing this is by creating a social, interactive forum.
A forum transforms your website from a static tool for delivering information, to something much greater. Your website becomes the online version of a neighborhood coffee house, a college seminar room, or even a back yard party. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a programmer to add a forum to your website.
Adding a Website Forum – Hosted/Install it yourself
Once you’ve decided to add a forum to your website, you have two basic options. You can either install it yourself or utilize a hosted forum solution.
• Install it yourself.
Whether you’re running your own server or using a third party hosting
company, you can do it yourself. Most hosting companies offer
free or low-cost forum software packages as a part of their
service. It’s very likely that you already have this service,
even if you only have a basic shared hosting account.
Most hosting companies offer easy to install forum tools like phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, or Vanilla Forum. Most of these are open source and relatively easy to install and administer. If you are running your own server, it’s just as easy—just download the software and install.
• Using a hosted
forum. If you’re not up to the challenge of installing and
administering a forum yourself, the simplest option is a forum
host. This option is usually inexpensive and sometimes
free. Sites like ProBoards (www.proboards.com) let’s you create
your forum on their server.
Note: the downside here is that your forum’s URL will be separate from your main site. From a marketing perspective this can be viewed as a marketing liability.
• Forum hosts like ActiveBoard are remotely hosted—unlike the install it yourself solution, their forum software is not actually located on your server. It can be incorporated into your website just by cutting and pasting a bit of code into an HTML box. So how does this work? Your actual website will load from your server and its forum will load from the forum host’s server. Not to worry, it’s all transparent to the end user.
Note: the “install it yourself” method does require a few extra
steps. For one, you should have a blank MYSQL database set up
first. Take care of this before your forum software is installed
(again, your web hosting company will probably have this
available).
Once your database has been properly set up its smooth sailing. Just download the forum software, unzip the file, run the setup executable file and follow the installation instruction.
Adding a Website Forum - We are making progress
If you have kept up with me so far you are doing great. Regardless of which method you choose, there will still be just a little bit more work ahead of you.
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come—so you’ll have to devote some time and energy into branding. We have to let potential visitors know where we are.
I recommend the following:
1. Marketing, branding, promoting your forum.
2. Seeding your forum with conversation starters. Solicit family and friends to help.
Also, don’t forget, you will need to moderate topics. You have to be on the lookout for spambots and undesirable posts.
Does adding a website forum sound like a lot of work?
It is but it’s a very worthwhile addition to your site.
In most cases it will help you build traffic and keep those same visitors coming back again and again.
Lets get start on adding a website forum today!
