By Richard Lowe, Jr. / Published on March 27th, 2008 / Marketing
least in your humble opinion). You've set it up and posted a few
things and waited for herds of people to start contributing. You wait
and wait. Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, and still
nobody visits your board. What's going on?
Something that is not obvious is that a message board must be
promoted just like anything else on the internet. In other words, you
have to let people know that your board exists and is interesting. I
know it seems kind of strange ... you created your board in order to
get people to come back to your web site, yet now you have to promote
the board as well?
The first thing you want to do is to link your board to your web
site. I know it seems obvious, but still it interesting how many
people forget this simple step. In addition, the link must be in an
obvious place, and it's wise to include it on every page of your site.
The next tasks is to start telling people about the existence of the
board. You are looking for contributors, especially early in the life
of the board. You want to find as many people as you can who will
actually contribute to the community that you are trying to build.
A good place to start is to lurk in other message boards, newsgroups
and email discussion lists with similar subjects. Read the messages,
then start posting your own to get established as someone who is
knowledgeable on the subject. You should start to determine who is
active in the board, perhaps make a few friends and gain some respect.
You can tactfully invite people to contribute to your own board.
Personally, I think it's very tacky to issue invitations in other
boards, newsgroups and discussion lists. I believe it is more
preferable to invite people one-on-one in personal emails. Posting an
invitation to a board is a great way to get the board members to
dislike you ... and do it often enough and they may eject you
entirely.
Just choose one or two people who are interested in your topic, who
you respect and admire and would make good contributors to your
board. Don't send a personal message to everyone - just a few
selected people.
Be sure your message board has been submitted to the search engines,
just like any other web site or web page. You will want to get it
into the top engines (these include Google, Altavista, Hotbot, Excite
and others).
You can also reference your board within your newsletter (you do send
out a newsletter, don't you?) and as part of your email signature. I
would not bother with FFA (Free For All) lists, paid advertisements
and banner exchanges. My experience is these promotional methods
require a lot of work for a small gain.
You should be promoting your board just as hard as you would promote
your web site, ebook and ezine. Each of these is a separate element
and can be promoted separately as well as together.
In summary, your board can be a very useful part of your overall
promotional strategy. Message boards are extremely useful in getting
people to return to your web site many times, but in order to be
useful they must be promoted heavily and constantly. If you do so,
then you may find your board will take on a life of it's own and
become as popular (or even more so) than your web site.
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
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