Add community to your site

By Patrick Tan
Posted Thursday, August 12, 2004

Good sites encourage interactivity. As I have mentioned earlier, people have a natural urge to share ideas and stories. We can provide interactive features such as chat rooms or message boards that facilitate online exchanges of ideas and opinions.

However, building an active message board is not an easy task. You can invite all the people you know to post messages at your message board, but still fail to garner enough messages to create an active discussion. According to marketing research firm, Forrester Research, a typical site requires at least 2,500 visitors per day to generate enough postings for an active discussion.

This is a tall order for most websites. We know that hosting an active message board will bring more visitors to our sites. But we simply do not have enough visitors to our sites to sustain an active forum. It would be useless to set up a message board and let it sit there with only a handful of messages.

Luckily, there is now a solution to this problem. Coolboard has come up with a unique message sharing system. Using the Coolboard system, all message boards in the same community can benefit from increased forum activity by sharing their messages with each other.

I have tested and incorporated a Coolboard message board to my site. It is free! Most importantly, it gives me an active message board complete with hundreds of messages instantly. The message board, hosted and maintained on Coolboard's server, can be set up easily in less than 5 minutes.

You can see my Marketing Forum at
(http://www.coolboard.com/boardshow.cfm/mb=6595141434125). It has been customized to look just like a part of my website, with identical graphics, background colors, fonts and navigation bars. See it yourself. I bet you will be impressed with the message board's seamless integration with my website.

In addition, Coolboard offers many unique features not easily found elsewhere:

+ User can post either text or voice messages.

+ User can identify himself with personal photo and signature.

+ You can screen messages before they are posted and ban undesired users from posting messages to your board.

+ You can add related news headlines to your message board to stimulate active discussions.

Get your free Coolboard message board now and start building a vibrant community online! Remember that a web community that clicks together sticks together.
Go to: (http://www.coolboard.com/boardshow.cfm/mb=6595141434125)

About the Author
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Patrick Tan, an entrepreneur and former journalist, offers a complete range of e-commerce solutions and services (editing, writing, translation, content development, web design, etc) to help you build a successful career online. Visit his site at (http://www.aloha-city.com) for more information. He publishes a free newsletter to share his experience and business know-how. Subscribe Now! mailto:basics@aloha-city.com