Turning the light switch on a forum.
Sooo, I'm just starting into the IM game and know basically nothing. One thing I'm planning on doing is using a forum software to build my mailing list, and once I have hit a critical mass flip the forum on. How the plan works is roughly as follows:
This lets you bypass the issues of creating a forum and struggling to fight the early ghost town days by making sure you already have enough people to generate activity.
It also makes for a nice selling point if you plan to flip the site. Overall I have never tested this method: though I am in the process of getting ready too. I'd love some comments on the idea in general as well as to know if folks would be interested in a case study of my efforts.
- Create a vanilla forum site and block it frome searches.
- Create a wordpress site and hook the comments up to the vanilla forum as well as JSConnect. [This makes it so that when someone registers or comments they are signed up to the forum.]
- Connect mass delivery plugin to Vanilla Forum.
- When people comment or register (for squeeze pages) to the wordpress install an account is created at the forum and you now have the ability to mass mail them.
- Once a critical mass is accomplished allow search engines to crawl your pages, and anounce the forum to your list.
This lets you bypass the issues of creating a forum and struggling to fight the early ghost town days by making sure you already have enough people to generate activity.
It also makes for a nice selling point if you plan to flip the site. Overall I have never tested this method: though I am in the process of getting ready too. I'd love some comments on the idea in general as well as to know if folks would be interested in a case study of my efforts.