How to promote ‘forum’ posts
Related entries in Making Money with BlogsSo I’m going to make up a term here and call it a "forum post" - it’s the closest thing I can think of to describe what happens to certain posts.
What I mean by "forum post" is a post where readers treat the post as if it were a forum, engaging fully in comments with each other. In so doing, the readers begin to focus their energies in replying to comments, not to the post content.
Why is this significant? From my perspective, it does two things: it continually updates my post as they enter a new comment. I like that, it’s good for Google. It increases the content on that page without action on my part, and thereby puts it higher in the search engine for both content and update frequency.
Secondly, it keeps my readers coming back. If they are engaged, they want to come back to see the responses and again continue the dialogue.
I see this particularly with my celebrity blogs. Random posts just explode into forum posts with 60+ comments infighting about something completely irrelevant to the post. I let it happen. Encourage it. Let slip some more angry comments to entice people to respond back. It’s a game I play.
But, over time, with the high volume of content I push out onto these blogs, those posts lose their position in search and the comment frequency declines, or shifts to other posts.
So, here’s my experiment:
I am going to take one blog, Hilary Duff, and I am going to see what I can do to revive those posts and make my site more of a forum. When I use certain phrases I know to be popular search terms, for example "Hilary & Joel", I will link back to a "forum post" of some sort. Thereby forcing Google to recrawl that post, up its position, and get readers to pop over.
Will it work? We’ll see. I hope so. Creating a "forum" environment on this specific topic is profitable. The audience is the right audience. They stay, they click, and sometimes they even buy. They help my blog significantly, and even talk about it on forums. They like my blog because it’s easier to use than a forum (duh), so I think it could work.
Will keep you posted :)
Tags: blog, forum, forum post, blogging, blog promotion, post popularity, teens, money, profitable, clicking
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January 6th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
And more importantly (to me at least) you’re attempting to build a community within your comments and thus within your blog. The fact that people are talking TO each other in your comments is an indicator you’ve got community there, all you need to do is talk to them and encourage them and it will take on a life of its own.
Good luck.