Building online forum as a business - cons

5 replies
Steve Pavlina owns one of the most highly traffic-ed self-improvement blog: stevepavlina.com
He is hardcore writer and each post on his blog is like an ebook which offers great, unique value to readers. [I tend to disagree with many of his posts and opinions, but who cares if Google loves you!]
Within years he created about 1000 posts in total.
Few years ago he launched a forum here: stevepavlina.com/forums
His forum generated close to 1 million of posts. The one would consider it as a big success - but apparently not!
Today he decided to shutdown forums for new posts completely - because "forum just became a distraction".
As Steve explained forum requires lots of resources to maintain it and police it and basically it is just a distraction from the main blog-based business.
He shares interesting inside-peek on cons of operating forum, especially valuable tips regarding ranking and SEO of forum vs. blog:
Forum Business
So, unless forum is specifically created as a business making tool - it's much easier to make money with just high quality blog!

Gleb
#building #business #cons #forum #online
  • Profile picture of the author bfas
    Interesting ideas, and some good points.

    I started a forum originally to support "Adsense $100k Blueprint", our first course. At the time, we wanted to provide a higher level of support than simply an email or 'support ticket' system, and that seemed the best way to go. It also provided an opportunity to add value relatively easily by adding to the forum.

    In that respect, I think we have a pretty different forum model, but as an asset I think we have a similar scenario. Our main focus in on our courses, and we put some effort into our main blog, though we promote the forum at the point of sale for the courses.

    As part of our business model, the forum is a high-value-add feature. We charge for membership - though we do some promotions which will include free forum membership as a value-add to the promotion - but the membership fee's aren't a huge money-maker.

    Currently at almost a year old, we have a little over 2100 members, and about 16,000 posts - many of which also are big, in-depth posts.

    Rather we build up the forum to make it a 'better and better' resource, which in turn creates more value for the courses. Also, since we 'bunch' everything in the one forum - support for each course - a member who purchases one course gets the benefit of the info & xtras from each course.

    I don't think I could accurately assess it's value, but it's hugely significant, even though we don't really use it as a marketing vehicle.

    Michael
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  • Profile picture of the author Ace1337
    Forums are hard to get rolling but once a community develops, people do all the work for you. It can bring a huge amount of long tail traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author bfas
    I should have added - our forum is 'noindexed', so it isn't a traffic generator; I was thinking just in terms of the forum itself and the impact to the business.

    Michael
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  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    Building a forum is real tough. It's like a catch 22. People won't want to participate if they see that there aren't alot of activity going on the forum in terms of posts. So to get started, you may have to create posts out of thin air to make it look like you have active participants.

    Also, you may have to direct all of your traffic to your forum to inspire more sign ups.
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    • Profile picture of the author MemberWing
      Originally Posted by Randall Magwood View Post

      Building a forum is real tough. It's like a catch 22. People won't want to participate if they see that there aren't alot of activity going on the forum in terms of posts. So to get started, you may have to create posts out of thin air to make it look like you have active participants.

      Also, you may have to direct all of your traffic to your forum to inspire more sign ups.
      I tried both. But as long as it's continuing dedicated effort - things dries up pretty quickly.
      I have a client who made 2,000+ posts on her new forum, she even got PR2 with Google, but no discussions are happening. It's like a ghost town. With blogs it'd be much easier to get traffic and related business.

      Gleb
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