Content Crooner

photo credit: brandonwu

Businesses must always be on the lookout for opportunities to create a community for their prospects and current clients. Anything you can do to promote a comprehensive value-based sales environment will significantly improve your chances for success.

Online forums create a microcosm of useful information, opportunities to address client hot buttons and a confidence-building sales funnel. These microcosmic elements work together to support the ideal buying scenario for new prospects and demonstrate reasons for your longtime clients to stay loyal. You can then use frequent article submissions to promote your forum and get the discussion started.

How to Attain an Attentive Audience

Breaking through to the masses can be an overwhelming task in such a competitive online environment. However, you can take a path of less resistance and create your own audience, making sure your word is heard by setting up your own forum. Online forums, sometimes referred to by the old name of bulletin boards, provide an open platform for discussion. (Chat rooms differ in that they feature a real-time conversation between visitors, rather than a permanent message thread)

You can easily post topics for discussion that relate back to your product or service, drawing people in from the search engines through an entire world of keywords and hot topics. Just be careful to maintain an information-oriented forum as opposed to a sales-based forum. Another idea is to encourage your customers to ask their support questions on the forum (where there is no need for privacy). This means that they could possibly get an even faster reply from another customer who knows the answer, and also that you won’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over because they’ll be there for everyone to see.

Free Forum Software to Get You Started

Go ahead and pinch yourself—you’re not dreaming. You can actually find quality forum software for free. A solid example of this free software is provided by phpBB. They’ve been in business for over 10 years so you can be confident that they’ve mastered this software by now, gotten the bugs out, and will continue to be around for additional support. Simply visit phpBB to download this open source forum software. The download process is relatively quick and simple, but you may want to have one of your techie friends nearby just in case.

User-friendly Interface for a Full-control Forum

Once you’ve installed the forum software you’ll have a number of customizable features that you can take advantage of. One of the biggest benefits is that you’ll maintain administrative capabilities as the forum owner, so you’ll have full control over the threads (main topic of discussion) and the comments (replies to main topic and other comments). Your moderation capabilities allow you to generate your own topics for discussion and allow or disallow comments (You can also use filters to automatically block spam messages and messages that contain unwanted keywords or profanity.)

You Wouldn’t Invite Guests Over If You Weren’t There

So don’t do it with your forum either. Of course, you’re not expected to camp out at your computer around the clock, but you’ll increase visitor retention if you make a concerted effort to at least show up according to a loose schedule: “I’m thrilled that you’re all taking advantage of the resources I’ve provide here and look forward to building a fantastic community for some industry busting idea sharing! I’ll be visiting every couple of days to make sure your questions are answered and you get everything you need.”

And since it takes less than a minute to post an update to your “Announcements” thread, you don’t have to worry about getting tied down to a schedule: “Sorry I couldn’t make it today everyone—the baby threw up, my car got a flat tire, and I forgot my wife’s anniversary.” Alright, you may not want to be so honest, but the point is that you should respect your audience’s time and keep them engaged by demonstrating that you’re serious about your forum—never take your audience for granted! This will also show them that you’re human, too.

Use Articles to Promote Your Forum—A Virtual Invitation through Value

Essentially, you’ll be using your marketing to promote your other marketing. Your car battery starts the car, the running car then keeps the battery charged. Comprehensive marketing does the same, achieving a cyclic efficiency. Create a stream of articles that link back to your forum to drive traffic to it. Your article marketing and new forum create the perfect complement to your website.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!