Converting Visitors to Member on Online Forums

Online forums are becoming more popular and more are coming online every day. Most markets are very saturated with forums making the barrier to entry higher. It is one thing to work hard at getting traffic to a forum, it’s another thing to convert that traffic into members or users, then it another thing to convert the member into a regular contributor. Each step along the way has its challenges and strategies to deal with it.

Getting traffic for a forum is the first challenge (after the valuable content has been created!) and is achieved through advertising, through email contacts, through getting the forum ranking well in the search engines, posting messages in other forums and on blogs. It can be a hard slog to achieve this if there is a lot of competition for your forum.

Once the strategies are in place to get the traffic, you then need to focus on getting that traffic to join the forum as a user or member. This is done by making sure the forum looks active and has lots of useful information that people want to be a part of. No one wants to be a member of a dead looking forum. There are many things you can do to get them to join with things like a welcome message telling of the benefits; you could perhaps display more advertisements to those who are not members; or you could restrict viewing of certain things (eg attachments) to members only. It is  important that the link to register on the forum is prominent and easy to find. Converting the visitor to a member can be a challenge.

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