There are several compelling reasons for creating a forum or a discussion board on your online home business website. First of all, if you’re just starting out online it’s a great way to entice people to interact with your content so they stay longer on your home page. After all, our main objective when driving traffic to our site is to keep people there long enough to examine our product offers and become paying customers.
Forums allow your prospects to communicate with one another thereby creating the opportunity for them to establish relationships. This is a tremendous way to generate return visitors to your website which will increase your chances of converting your guests to clients because the more often people visit your web page the more likely they are to buy something and become a customer.
These chat rooms are now easier to create than ever because many hosting services such as Word press have software available which you just plug-in to your website to produce your discussion board. C-panel or your website’s control panel facilitates management of your new feature allowing you to control which comments and posts are allowed and which should be removed.
One of the secrets to creating a popular forum from the start is to promote its establishment prior to the launch date. You can announce it on other people’s blogs and forums, you can tweet the day and time via your twitter account and you can post it on your facebook wall just to name a few advertising techniques.
You can also get the ball rolling yourself by posting a few threads about controversial topics of the day which may encourage some of your visitors to join the discussion. This way you’re more likely to have a well populated and active chat room instead of a desolate and silent space which can be embarrassing to you as the webmaster.
After you’ve fashioned your discussion room you shouldn’t forget about it. In order to keep people interested you have to find new ways to engage them in this activity so they’ll keep coming back to add their input.
There are several ways you can encourage their participation such as asking your subscribers to use the chat area to make suggestions about your home business and your website. You can persuade them to use it as a comment box by leaving both negative and positive feedback about your Internet enterprise.
Another advantage of having this discussion area on your website is you can use it to promote new products you may be introducing and encourage members to check them out. You can also add a customer survey to this space at regular intervals to question your members on different areas of your venture that may be a concern for you as the owner.
So as you can see there are many advantages to having a separate area on your home business web page for your visitors and your customers to voice their opinions and their concerns as well as socialize and establish relationships with other forum members. This engagement by your subscribers can only help reinforce customer loyalty and assist you with maintaining an active and happy email list of prospects and current clients for many years to come.
