Question

Topic: Strategy

How To Increase My Forum Visitors?

Posted by rum68br on 1/20/2013 at 5:21 PM ET 350 Points
The company I work for provide information about taxation. The company website usually gets 900k unique visitors per months. With the success we decided to incorporate a forum for people to exchange their problems and provide solutions four years ago. The forum has over 40k registered members.

This years focus is to increase the visitor flow going to the forum from our site and from general web search. Can any one suggest ways to increase forum traffic?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 1/20/2013 at 5:43 PM Moderator
    Have you tried Google Adwords to get people to the forum? That would seem to be an easy way to start.

    The next thing I'd recommend is to do some market research among current forum members to see who they are, why they are members, what benefits they get, what else they'd like, whether they'd recommend the forum to a friend (and what they'd say if they were recommending it), etc. Once you know who the target audience REALLY is it will be much easier to plan a campaign to attract more folks like them.

    Also, you don't mention how you get paid to do whatever it is you do. WHY do you provide this information? What's in it for you? What is the value of an additional forum member? How much are you able to spend to acquire a new member?
  • Posted by Moriarty on 1/20/2013 at 6:08 PM Accepted
    Another possibility is the dreaded social media ... Twitter et al.

    The point is that you have a forum. People who join post their problems. That is your cue: these are genuine problems that need real, genuine answers.

    So tweet those problems in a generalized way - tweet or adwords - and you have one method of tapping into what your potential members are thinking.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 1/20/2013 at 6:56 PM Accepted
    On your website, highlight a forum's thread. Perhaps a different one each day, or have each day of the week be a different theme (small business taxation, inheritance, etc.).

    When people do searches on your website, do forum Q&A also get listed (perhaps in a separate section)? That'll help people organically find answers to their questions.
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