Pros and Cons of adding a forum

Hello everyone,

We are considering adding a forum to our site, signature, to help create more of a comunity feeling and hopefuly attact new customers.

If anyone here has ran a service based site for a decent amount of time without a forum and then added one, what changes did you see if any.


Thanks!

 

I will start you off with a few pros and cons@

Pros:
Gives an informal chance to notify your customer base of specials and changes
Gives a bigger SE Presence

Cons:
Time consuming to moderate
If the forum looks empty, may actually cost you sales


There are a ton more but I thought I would start the ball rolling

 

For niche websites/blogs, i would add a forum.

 

Hmm not many people have experience with this I see

 

I have so far only addded a forum at a site which distributes an anti-spam solution. It is a customer support center. So, it falls in the niche solution category and it does not matter if it is busy.

I have thought many times about adding a forum to my busiest site, but remain unconvinced. If it is inactive, it looks very bad and makes my site look like it has no traffic. I have also had no demand for it and 99% of my conversations with customers starts out with, "don't quote me but. . . " That is not going to be very conducive to an active forum.

As an interim measure, I allow comments back on postings to all my new sites. So far, 99% of comments need to be deleted because they are spam. Otherwise, nothing stimulates discussion. Until it does, I think a forum would be a waste of time.

Having said all that, you might, as a first step, see if there are forums in your niche and if they are busy. If they are, maybe it will work.

 

i am trying out smf forum as i want to have a better understanding of forums. so i will keep this one and see how it works out

 

Forums can be incredible assets to your site. One of the most important aspects of forums in the incredible amount of unique content members can generate on a daily basis. This allows your site to be found via keywords and keyphrases you never would have guessed people search for.

 

You get a lot more search engine traffic by adding a forum. Maybe you could turn the traffic into sales!

 

Thats bullshit. You dont get more SE traffic JUST because you have a forum. Forums are just like any other website. You have to do your SEO -

 

Chris at www.websitepublisher.net has some great articles on forums. Look at the article list at the top of the home page.

 

Yeah - I remember reading those articles whe i was just getting started