My experience online practically started with online forums and the communities around them so I find myself constantly drawn back to them and now to discussing them. Since most forums use one of a dozen or so general software packages, it continues to puzzle and downright baffle me how none of these companies has really seemed to do a good job of introducing a marketing strategy out of the box. What do I mean? Well just pick a forum, any forum, yours, one you use, the first one you find in Google, and then dig in to a subcategory or thread and what do you see? You see the content and nothing else.

So what’s wrong with showing just the content? Well as any search marketer would tell you, campaigns need landing pages and forums do too. Paid traffic and link exchanges are easy to deal with, you get to pick the url, you get to create the message. Organic search and type-in traffic is more difficult to deal with since it can come to literally any part of the site but a guest is still a guest and methods are definitely available to talk to them like you would on a landing page, yet few do. What I generally see when engaging with a forum community is a ton of repeat visitors using (and clearly loving) the site and a lot of new visitors bailing on page one or two. Why? Because forums, especially large ones tend to have a ton of content and sections and they can be overwhelming to put it simply.

So for the forum owners out there, I thought I’d put together a few simple tactics you can try on your own sites to help direct traffic around.

1. If you plan to do marketing (and everyone should plan for that) you need to create a landing page for every unique campaign. A basic landing page doesn’t require much – take your existing site layout, simplify the navigation, add in a few images that capture the niche, a headline that speaks to the campaign subject and some supporting text. Throw a few bullet points in with benefits of registering for the site as well as the appropriate links to content that matches the campaign. Now people coming to your site from a listing will have a sense as to what they’re landing on and where to go next.

   You can start with a few basic landing pages for various top level campaigns and if they seem to be working, drill down into more granular levels. Remember to keep testing and refining your landing pages, watching where people go when they hit them, how many register or login and how many bail to gauge success.

   Bonus Idea – If you really want to expand on this, consider creating a few mini-portals which contain a combination of marketing copy with site information from your actual user driven tools to give the user a fully defined jump point for the specific topic they came in on. Mini portals can pull in data from the other features you may have in your forum and get visitors beyond just finding threads and therefore promote more of your site from the first touch point in.

2. Since landing pages require a specific access point and don’t cover the entire site, put a greeting on every page on the site for guests. Often referred to as “welcome headers” or “guest notices”, a simple message describing the community, explaining the benefits and cost of registering and linking to a few popular features and areas is a great way to get visitors on any page to know what’s going on. Returning members won’t see this if they’re logged in, and if they’re browsing as a guest they’ll have another reason to login which you should want them to do anyways.

Bonus Idea – You don’t have to stop with guests here. Create other conditional messages for new members, in active members, loyally members and any other classifications you want to talk to. Give them messages that relate to actions they may want to take, things they need to do (like verifying their email address) as well as general announcements that pertain to them specifically. This way you’re constantly addressing personalized needs and informing people rather than hoping they find their way to your news or support areas.

3. Develop a navigation and forum structure that gets visitors to the right area logically and quickly. With potentially dozens of different topics inside a niche, people need other ways to find content besides just clicking “forums” and seeing a list in use order. Be sure your navigation prevents different ways for different groups to reach information. For a regionally driven site this could me an interactive map or drop downs with countries/ states. For a DIY site how about using category lists grouped into lighter pages with heavy icon use. Even your forum directory pages can benefit in being organized into more defined sections and made easily collapsible and searchable so someone coming in for one specific topic isn’t stuck trying to find it in a sea of dozens.

4. Guests are new so keep things simpler for them than for your power users. Excessive navigation, long stats modules in posts and extra long pages can work wonders for members who return to your site daily to contribute and read but for a guests it’s just more clutter that they have to sift through. Identify the features, navigation elements and data that matters to guests and show them little more. You can always include messaging along the lines of “register to see more” or “access your account for the complete page” explaining and even showing screenshots of what the guest and member experiences are like but at the end of the day you want to insure people get to information and don’t get stuck looking at the number of posts other members made, the upload photo utility and so forth.

5. Recognize that many people found you from a single specific query rather than a broader need so center value around a short term, specific need. When I started my second forum in the Scuba Diving space I realized that for many of our visitors, they weren’t looking to post or join in a community immediately, if at all. Instead they found us because they heard we had information on a topic, a video they should checkout or from an organic listing about a very specific and long-tail query. Pushing everything on these visitors to join a community wouldn’t make sense… instead you need to focus information on getting their question/ thought/ issue resolved. If you can do that, you provide value which you can back up with more interactive tools they may then chose to jump into.

6. This falls much in line with the mini-portal idea as you really want to consider expanding information beyond just threads. Using blogs, wikis, directories and other tools can help push multiple relevant information streams to your visitors that help them find the information they came for in a format they want to use, whether it’s a listing for a specific store or shop or an overview answer.

   Bonus Idea – Within your forums creating sticky topics linking to common threads is a great way to both avoid rehashing ideas every other day and getting members the information they need. If you can identify questions shared by many visitors and answer them in a single thread linking out to detailed discussions you help to centralize information and make it useful so navigation time is minimized and the opportunity for engagement increases.

7. Ultimately you want people to register so clean up the registration process. This almost deserves a thread of its own but it’s a huge issue. No landing page would ever show a form like the standard forum sign up forms… cluttered boxes, limited information and no sales copy, it’s just no good. I suggest throwing out your registration page and putting together something that’s faster, gets just the data you need and continues to reinforce your values and offering throughout the process.

My last suggestion is to continue to think outside the box and customize everything. Forum software comes with tons of features, templates and content which many people just end up leaving alone. If you’re like me and use dozens of forums powering through topics this may be ok but for your new visitors, they want to see relevancy at every step and turn. If you spend the time to customize your pages, remove the items that don’t relate to your site and modify the copy so it does, people become more comfortable browsing and are able to identify that you (and not your competitors) are the destination for them. Don’t assume that just because thousands of forums have a box in a certain place you have to as well… test changing where things sit within reason and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how much easier things are to use and how many more people use them.