Know Your World Better!
20 Mar
Have you ever wondered how important is “Word Of Mouth Traffic”? If you haven’t yet, then it is time to do so. Word of mouth traffic is extremely important for any forum to grow faster.
What Is Word Of Mouth Traffic?
The members who post and be active on your forums tell their online or offline friends about your forum and ask them to join the community. Since their good friends are saying this, specially real life friends, they do check out the forum and join it also. Such kind of traffic is known as word of mouth traffic.
Is such kind of traffic good?
Word of mouth traffic is better than search engine traffic due to its conversion ratio. Majority of the referrals turn into members and even become active members. My forum has a lot of active members referred by their friends who still post.
But do members refer others usually?
Not really. For some reasons members don’t like to refer others to your forum because they are either lazy or forget about telling anyone else about your forum. Some don’t think that the forum is good enough to tell others but still be active on your forum.
How should I make them refer others?
Very simple. Push them. Don’t literally go and push them. I mean offer them incentives. Start a contest like “The person who will refer the most people in a limited time will win $$$”. Or make some premium memberships available on your forum and give them for free to contest winners. I am going to try the premium memberships trick soon. I will let you all know if that works.
Why does a forum grow faster with word of mouth traffic?
Easy. Word of mouth traffic has the best ever conversion ratio. Many word of mouth visitors turn into active forum members who be active and continue to post for a longer time. Much better than search engine referrals. Search engines give a very low visitor to active member conversion ratio. Those who own an active forum will understand me. If your site gets 5000 unique visitors from google everyday, 50 turn into members only and 1 or 2 or nobody out of those 50 become an active member. So 1:5000 or 1:2500 is the actual ratio. But from word of mouth traffic, the ratio would be 1:1, 1:2, 1:3. So you see the difference? Try out this trick and see your forum grow fast.
it is true that every product increases in its popularity by mouth to mouth advertisement, but to get those you still have to be offering something very very good because now a days it is very competitive.
Word of mouth has always been the type of recommendation that carries the most weight. When we hear something direct from someone’s mouth, we humans have this funny idea that waht we have just heard is true. I take the view that everyone is truthful until I know otherwise so I always listen when someone says to me,
“Hey, did you hear about…?”
I’ve also opened a forum, integrated the phpbb3 fully with mylol, waiting to see the effect.
I have a potential of 10,400 users, but I do have to get familiar with phpbb3 and the rc7 mods. *ouch*
Good tips on the post though.
Nice to meet you.
I had a look at blog.
Thank you very much for your little tutorial, it will help me build my own forum which needs traffic badly now.