Forum Community

A forum, also called a discussion board or bulletin board system, has the potential to bring a great amount of quality traffic to your site. This form of community-building can greatly increase your site's stickiness -- making people want to return frequently. People come back to see what others have written and to make their own contributions.

This can be helpful as an amateur or professional troubleshooting forum, a place to share news about the site's topic, or have a variety of other uses. The key, like with your website, is to focus on a niche area not found frequently, with the potential for a large number of interested visitors.

Besides getting information from visitors who register on your site, you can also use the forum to get feedback from a user group you know is already interested in the topic. This can be both indirect through studying users' posts, and direct, specifically asking their input with questions, surveys, and polls.

A message board also benefits your site and business in the form of free content. A popular board continuously generates information from people who enjoy writing about the board's subject. New visitors are attracted to these frequent changes and may also find the site's forum through search engines, then proceed to the main site. Forums are another valuable aspect of a thriving website.