Hi, I'm just wondering I've got a website thats attracting a decent amount of people I've got a landing page thats offering a free minicourse. I haven't had a lot of sign ups, so i'm wondering why people are coming for? I put up polls in the past to find out and got little if no response. Would I be wasting my time just taking the landing page down and putting up a forum. Could it solve my problem or what would you do? And what are the benefits of having a forum? Thats in advance for your great advice.
If you are looking at it from a businessman's point of view, message boards are totally useless unless you are making money from it. Why are you asking us why people are coming to your site? You tell us. It's your site. As for not having a lot of sign ups. It's normal. Not many will sign up.
Advantages of a forum -user generated content -users are easily able to give you feedback Disadvantages -forums are extremely difficult to get off of the ground -an inactive forum can make your brand look dead
Thanks for your replies. I was thinking that one myself about a dead forum looking bad. I thought if it was up I could see what people were discussing to give me some product ideas that they might be interested in.
forum can be great for building a community but it's a lot of work as well. first you need to get the visitors to post in the forum and it's not very easy especially for a new forum, next you end up spending all your time moderating it and cleanign out the spam.
It's the whole Web 2.0 thing. Having a forum on your site is another reason for the punters to stay around - I don't necessarily think that people come to your site for the forum in the first place - that's the content. When you've got a forum that's being heavily used your visitors are doing your work for you in that they're giving you the content.
If you put a forum on your site, remember to make it active otherwise a dead forum may drive away many visitors instead of attracting, just a thought.