Internet Marketing for SBF

[Scottish Business Owner]

Hi All,

I've posted another post in the marketing section about offline type marketing. I dont want to ignore online and wondered if some of the internet marketing guys could give me their opinions as to how they would promote SBF.

Does it lend itself to PPC etc?

 

[stuarty]

- what are your goals?

If you can give us an idea of what you want to achieve then we can all pull together with the expertise we have and hopefully achieve your goal.

Is it just to increase readership/members?

Is it to increase revenue?

There are loads of things we can do to help but we need to assess your targets first.

It's called proposition development

- what are you selling/offering?
- who are your customers/members and what do they want?
- who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?

If you can post some stuff on this then we can get the ball rolling.

 

[Boxby]

I know a forum owner who has concentrated soley on new signups and member numbers, and as a result they have a huge membership but no posters, no new threads.

I think that the thing with forums is about the posts and the quality of the posts & the discussion and debate. Some of the longest running threads on UKBF are controversial. Forums that are full of "hi this is me", and "use me, use me, use me!" posts are very boring, and don't encourage visitors to come back. (Not saying that there are a lot of those here, but it is a bit of a forum killer, and when you only get lots of new sign ups this tends to take over the forum)

FBF is an interesting forum, a very small membership but a very active core, you can be pretty much guaranteed that everyday there will at least a two very current threads not solely business orientated, also picking up on news and politics, which get a bit of debate going. This makes it worth "looking in" every day.

One really cheap way of online marketing may be simply just to get together a group of people, who aren't afraid of a bit of discussion and debate, to take on some current and maybe contraversial business and maybe non business topics, and make sure that each of posts new threads and answers every day.

I think the thing with forums is that people are much more likely to respond/answer a thread than to start a new thread. So maybe for a while, you give them something to talk about.

You already use Vbulletin, which as far as I can see is one of the most SEO'd up forum softwares. If you implement the tagging, and your above posters use the tagging on the current and contraversial posts, then i think that should improve the online side of things with very little outlay.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards
Sandra

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

Sandra you make some good points which I totally agree with. When I look at other forums to try and guage how popular they are I tend to ignore the number of members. Quite often I will check in at a simialr point each days and take a note of how many posts have went on since I last checked. When you do this for a week or two you get a good impression of how good a site it is. But that only up to a point as you have to do a lot more digging to see what types of posts etc a forum is attracting so it's never cut and dry.

I think i'm still to be convinced that you can heavily monetise a forum and on the two occassions i've tracked it I dont think it's been successful. My own opinion is that people who post on forums tend to see it as being partly theirs and take pleasure in discussing and debating various business issues etc. For me the goals for the forums are to increase the numbers of members who contribute regularly.

The blog is completely different and I do think that offers far more scope for monetisation. I'm jotting some things down in that respect and will post again when it all makes sense

 

[stuarty]

The blog is completely different and I do think that offers far more scope for monetisation.

Can I say I told you so joke joke joke ducks for cover...

Seriously though - you can make a serious amount from a forum but IMO and experience, blogs are where it's at.

We had this discussion when we were drinking beer IIRC

 

[peteark]

I have already stated the forum would be but a small part of a Scottish Business Organisation, if I owned it, I would let it tick over whilst putting other parts of the jigsaw together.

 

[StevenAitchison]

Hi

The quickest way to gauge what people are looking for is to start a PPC campaign as mentioned.

I would get a landing page together, giving them the benefits of joining a group like SBF, and I would say for a limited time there will be no charge to join this group (this way you are creating a perceived value and a time factor). I would also put up an email capture form and offer a free ebook, as I said in the other post. By collecting peoples email addresses you can then market to them in the future offering quality affiliate products, therefore you are effectively monetising the forum. Once they have signed up you then redirect them to the forum, although they would have to register there as well.

I wouldn't use the forum for sending emails out as you might lose some registrants. Keep the email marketing and the forum seperate, this way someone can unsubscribe from your email list but still be part of the forum.

You could also grab some keyphrases quite cheaply for your PPC campaign so it shouldn't cost too much for your traffic for a short test period.