Since I setup my first blogs / forums several / few years ago, I’ve always wondered how to get people from all over the internet to participate. I still don’t have a definitive answer, but I have several ideas.
As far as forums are concerned, I think with my old forums (before I deleted them) it would have been better not to show the year they were posted, or remove the date all together. I know this seems rather odd, but I have seen this before. Although this doesn’t attract people, it does give the impression that the forum is still new and any posts old or new count towards this.
Blue said a few weeks ago, her thought that the key to blog participation was, to use good keywords in your posts. I guess this is a key factor in any page, but I think links will be needed also.
An idea I had, perhaps a little sneaky, to pretend your lots of people and post as these people, to make your blog forum seem popular. I have tried this before, but its a lot of work and can look really obvious that its one person.
Finally, something which occurred to me a few days ago, what about creating an online association, theres associations for everything, I don’t see why we couldn’t do this for any topic.
The obvious benefits from participation is the PR and SEO value.
Maybe a combination of these strategies could work well.
Thoughts?
by JM
{ 3 } Comments
In terms of the blog I don’t think a blog is a good
medium for mass participation except via comments. For
this blog, links from other sites would be good.
Directories are easy to get links from but they aren’t any
good any more.
As for forums, empty forums on sites always look sad.
One strategy would be to set up a standalone forum on
its own domain and encourage visitors, e.g. by allowing
dofollow signature links. When (if!) the forum gets buy
enough, move it into the target site, e.g. softtester, and
redirect it from the domain name. Webmaster forums
always seem to get participation if they offer dofollow
links although the content can be spammy.
Sorry “When (if!) the forum gets buy
enough, move it into the target site, e.g. softtester, and
redirect it from the domain name. ”
I’m confused by this?
People are more likely to participate in a standalone
forum, say one you make at www dot newforum dot com. If the
forums gets busy – say 500 or 1000 threads – so that it
doesn’t look dead, you then copy the forum to www dot
softtester dot com/forum (for example) to bring it into
softtester and then 301 redirect www dot newforum dot
com to the softtester forum URL.
The idea is that you never have an empty, embarrassing
forum within your site.
Post a Comment