Effective Strategy To Gain Members As Well As Keep Those That You Already Have

This is an effective way to keep people coming back to your site. It can not only help current members stay interested, but it can also help you to generate new subscribers to your membership site.

An an example how effective this technique can be, I watched one forum owner use this strategy. He successfully drove his site into the top 5000 most visited sites on the internet according to the Alexa rankings.

That wasn't too bad, considering did it within about a year of starting the forum.

Here is the tactic he used very successfully.

The Forum Re-Post Tactic

As any successful membership web site owner will tell you, the discussion forum is the very heart and soul of your site. People will join your web site based on the articles and benefits they believe they will get from your site. They will stay members of your site, based on the sense of community and continuing value that you provide them through your discussion forums.

There is a problem however.

When a site is just getting started, it can be difficult to generate interest with people to get them to post in the discussion forum.

The idea is to send out a weekly summary of the top posts in the forum. Instead of simply quoting the posts, a more effective method is to rephrase the subject of the post and maybe asked some provocative questions for people to reply back to.

Here would be an example of a couple of top post snippets. These would be broadcast every week or two to your list:



========================================
Why did my site get banned from Google?...
========================================

... Mark asks for help as his sites suddenly disappeared
out of Google's listings. Read what some search engine
experts had to say, including Jerry and Dan. They include
a warning about one of Mark's other sites which is also at risk..
Here is the forum thread about it:
http://www.membershipsiteowner.com/members/forum/openforum.cfm?forum=1




==================================
Outrageous refund request....
==================================

... Julie shared this rather "interesting" request for a refund from
of her customers. You would think they would have asked sooner
than 8 months later! GaryG shares some valuable insights as well
as a great suggestion on how to handle this type of customer:
http://www.membershipsiteowner.com/members/forum/openforum.cfm?forum=1

Even though I made up those just for examples, you should be able to get the idea. To see it first hand, make sure you are signed up for my tip of the week on this site.

You will see that the actual posts are not reproduced word for word. Instead you may want to consider resummarizing them.

Set The Tone

You should pay attention to the overall feel of these reposts.

For example, it almost has a "cliffhanger" types feel to it. In other words it is a bit teasing and encourages people to want to read the rest of the post.

If you pay attention to your own habits while browsing a forum, you may realize something interesting. It is not always just the quality of the content that's in there, it is also the human element which is of interest.

It is one of the reasons that soap operas and drama TV shows are so popular. You get a bit absorbed into the different character personalities and you're wondering what is going to happen next.

This tactic employs this in a very subtle way but is also very effective.

I know this because reading through this particular person's forum post emails, I found myself time and again clicking on the links to read the rest of the discussion forum.