Considering Adding A News Feed To Forum

I run a small PR 4 music recording / band site that I usually add 2 articles and 3 blogs per week to. The forum is getting by, but if I didn't post on it daily, I'm not sure how long it would last. I'm sitting at around 250 members, but very few of those are active and I've gotten around 6,500 posts. I'm considering the idea of putting “latest music news” on the left hand column of my forum. There is no way that I could keep up with latest news myself so this would have to be an RSS feed from another site.

For you guys, has adding a little news section that linked to someone else's site (possibly many sites if I use a Google or Yahoo feed, for example) added value to your site or has taken it away?

Thanks,
Brandon

 

I have a couple of sites where I have filled in empty areas with RSS feeds of other relevant sites, and on a couple I have added the feed of my own site. Although I never used them in forums.

While I haven't noticed a tangible traffic return, esthetically it looks better having content than blank space.

 

How have your visitors reacted?

I guess I'll just have to test.
Possiblity #1 - My members have more stuff to talk about after reading the music news which they probably wouldn't have ever read.
Possibility #2 - People who may have joined the site are whisked off to some other site never to return again.

Brandon

 

You can add custom Google newsfeeds or Yahoo newsfeeds to your site. It's not like the scraping scripts that people used before. This can sometimes enrich your site. If people want to use Yahoo or Google, they're going to anyways, regardless of your feed. But as always, it's original content that will bring people back.