I thought having a forum within a website might kill two birds with one stone.
First, you can start drawing attention and getting some activity going by creating a community-like atmosphere. Second, you get lots of text that might help you in search engines. Third, but definitely not the least important aspect is, you have some content building as you gather things like graphics, products, articles, and links.
Does anyone else ever take this approach or do you wait to have everything ready to load and only start trying to build traffic afterwards?
I've never tried this before, but theres plenty of successful websites out there using this method, its definately a viable option. Just make sure your going to stick with it, because in 6 month, if you want to seperate your forums, it can really confuse members and you'll loose traffic, and PR, etc.
I have been thinking lately about doing the same thing. I notice on my pet food site that people are emailing asking for recipes with particular ingredients. Also with this recent pet food scandal, people are asking questions.
I was thinking a forum would help those who have questions, allow others to enter pictures of their pets and also let users enter their own recipes.
A forum would certainly save me the work of answering emails everyday and would actually benefit my users making my site more attractive.
I am slowly working up "seed" articles for each area of my forum to give something for people to read and respond to. This part is quite the handful but then Rome wasn't built in a ay. I feel that being patient will bring better results that rushing to get activity, when it comes to a forum meant to help feed a site.
I plan to submit the forum page to search engines on its own in hope that some people might enter the site through it. Does this make sense or is it pure folly on my part?
Forums is always a good addition to a website. It creates a community, and gives people a reason to come back.
I once had a site that whose traffic was solely built on it's forum.
People were coming to the forum to socialize, and I was posting them "Site Announcments" with my latest offers.
Got quite a number of sales this way.
I have a forum that is getting loads of hits from search engines but I find it comes mostly from the titles of posts. Be as specific as you can with those and it helps.
Just remember that writing for the forum more than doubles your time if you're doing a daily blog as well. There's also all the pruning of threads (the dreaded thread drift syndrome) not to mention spam that appears daily.
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