Everyone says, "put content on your site". My problem is, I have minimal coding skills and I own a forum. With this in mind, what kind of content could I put in my forum? BTW, my from is related to education. www.thedailystudent.com
with a forums you only need to increase your traffic to it. The content will come from your members. However you can try adding some categories that you write or post articles in that your members can read and enjoy. These areas would be for you to post in only so that you can keep them coming back to read more. It also has the added effect of being quality content that triggers the search engine spyders to check your site more often. It is best to write or add new content as often as you can and at least a minimum of once a week. Remember to keep it interesting and relevant to your site and members. Also make sure the work, if copied from another site, is free for you to use under their terms so that you do not violate their TM's, Copyrights and such.
I don't think you need to add too much content to your forum. Just add different categories and keep them updated with fresh articles, new threads and posts. Your main objective should be getting targeted traffic to your forum. I would suggest you to target the real visitors of a few educational sites.
Thanks for the replies,
Also, I want to know if I do make a forum for articles for me to post, should I leave it open for everyone to read or will search engines crawl through it if it is locked to members only? Thanks
you could always set up an incentive to get traffic to it aswell.also if everyone says get content, why not build a site around the forum?you could pay someone in NP$ to make your forum look just like your site once you get your site up aswell, and make it so that everything is pretty much the same as your site, if you choose to make a site around it that is.
You could, but I would let this section be an article section that you post in only for informational purposes. I would encourage them to submit their works too and check them against www.copyscape.com to make sure they are not plagerizing someones work. Search will craw those areas btw as most of the bigger forums offer these sections to their visitors.
Yes, I think the search engines will search through it even if it is locked and a visitor would be asked for a login to view the articles after clicking on the link appeared in search results but IMO you should keep the forum open to everyone to read. This will help in making your forum popular. Without knowing the content of the forum I don't think many would register.
You might want to see if you can find someone else that also is trying to grow their forum and participate in a post exchange. You can also participate in other forums that are of similar subject matter, and post a link to your forum in your signature (like here).
