Adding a forum to your site can be very beneficial. Forums can improve search rankings, increase traffic, and create a stronger bond between you and your potential patients. They can provide visitors with an added sense of security and reliability, while also increasing your credibility on the Internet. Further, a good forum can give you a competitive edge and really set you apart from others within your field. An added benefit is that a forum can provide you with a glimpse inside your visitors’, or potential patients’, minds, helping you to understand just what they really want and what their concerns are.
Today, there seems to be a forum for just about every imaginable topic. Further, there may not be just one forum for any given topic, but hundreds. At the time of this writing, a simple search on Google for ‘plastic surgery forum’ brought back about 121,000 results. All 121,000 of those results may not be actual forums, but there are no doubt many, many forums on the Internet that are related to plastic. This can make it difficult for a new forum to be successful on the Internet. Creating the actual forum is often the easiest part, but getting people to read and post on your forum can be much more difficult. The following are tips for encouraging talk and increasing your forum’s activity:
- Start topics. Nobody likes being the first to post a thread. Because of that, you’ll likely need to start posting topics yourself. Make sure that these are interesting topics. You can even use a few different usernames and post a variety of topics and responses.
- Make your sign-up easy. Your sign-up process should be short and easy. Don’t ask for unnecessary details like a visitor’s age, sex, location and so on. Visitors typically don’t like giving out this kind of information and rarely want to take the time to do so.
- Discuss your content. Any articles on your website can have a link to your forum at the end and a message suggesting that they discuss the article in your forum.
- Easy access. Your forum should be easily accessible from every page on your website.