This is part II of a series of articles that will teach you how to build a business around any discussion board that you may want to start. Read part I (how to drive more members to your forum) here.

Step 2 : More fans

A “fan” would be somebody who, obviously, posts to the forum. However most forum members sign up and never even take the time to log in afterwards.
Here was my plan :

  • On a phpBB board, you can set it so people have to “activate” their account. That makes no sense. I don’t want to activate anything dude, I just wanted to ask a question right ? - I removed this extra step.
  • What happens when you sign up ? you get a confirmation message that basically says “hey you did register. just login now.” Well, the guy who did this never thought about actually including a LINK to login… or even better, a LOGIN form ! I did. I edited the page so when you sign up you get a login box that is PRE-FILLED with your info right under the confirmation message.
  • So more people were signing up, and more people actually logged in after registration. I still needed them to POST messages - the content right ? So I just made that “first login” form redirect you to… wait for it… the “Post new topic” form ! So here you are, you just registered, logged in, and you are seeing the “post new topic” form in the “Introduce yourself” forum.

At this point I started getting lots of new members posting for the first time - but that led to a bunch of problems and more optimization was needed.

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« How to drive more members to a forum
Should you sell something that’s available for free elsewhere ? »

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 12:10 and is filed under English Content, Forum Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.