The Pros and Cons of Starting a Forum

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Today we talk about Forums. These may be called “message boards” and are a great tool for your audience to interact with each. For some websites, people use them to support a product or service. They can be lovely additions to your online promotional arsenal. There are some great advantages to having a forum. Podcasts such as the Rock and Roll Geek (which has 387 members), and Keith and the Girl have forums (which has 24,736 members)..

The Good Side Of Forums

1. Great source for show topics.

2. Great networking tool for listeners/viewers which helps build community.

3. Most forums have the ability to be monitored via RSS (instead of having your inbox filled up).

4. There are free tools available (or you can go with vbulletin which is a great professional grade forum script).

The Bad Side of Forums

1. Some popular tools like phpbb are free, but often are targets of spam robots (this has improved over the years).

2. If you don’t have at alst 1000 listeners, 2000 visitors to your website, or a REALLY active smaller audience your forums may look like a ghost town.

3. Flame wars – just because people get to network together doesn’t mean they will like each other.

4. You need to nurture forums, and provide topics to get people talking.

Turn Your Blog Into a Forum

There is a great plugin for WordPress called “Subscribe to comments” that can alert people when a new comment was posted. This may trigger them to come back to your blog and leave another comment (so it spurs time shifted conversations – which can then be used for show topics).

BlogWorld Expo Early Bird Pricing Ends This Week

The blogworld expo early bird pricing ends July 15th. Use the coupon code ” ebird ” and save an additional 20%.

Podcastclicks.com returns to Free Service

After switching to a fee based podcast promotion tool, podcastclicks.com has returned to being a free service.  What is it?

It is a banner exchange program where you upload your banner to your website, sign up at podcastclicks.com and create an account. Then you copy and paste some code on to your website (typically into a text widget in your sidebar). When you show a banner on your site, your banner is shown on another site. We’ve delivered 9720 click in July of 2010.

The advantage of podcastlicks.com is you are getting your podcast information in front of people who are already consuming podcasts.

The Rules of Podcastclicks.com

You can only have one banner on a page (in other words, no cheating).

You have to accurately list your podcast (all banner listings are moderated).

No animated banners.

No porn.

For podcasters only.

The Catch of Podcastclicks.com?

To help pay for the bandwidth and servers for podcastclicks.com will feature one banner for the school of podcasting in each category. If that bugs you, and you don’t want more listeners – don’t use it.

Same Day Music Lets You Pay Half Now and Half Later

When it comes to getting all your gear to start a podcast, you might be putting out close to 200-300 dollars. Don’t have that kind of cash? Same Day Music Now has a way to help you afford your initial start up costs. You can pay half now and half later. Here is the “small print.”

After 30 days there’s a nominal fee of .01%, just to make sure your card is still active. SpeedPlay Payments are available on most orders of $249 or more, and are limited to $3,000 in merchandise. Any amount over $3,000 will be added to your initial payment. SpeedPlay is available to customers within the 50 United States. There is a  one-time processing fee charge is $4.00. SpeedPlay Payments are available on most orders of $249 or more, and are limited to $3,000 in merchandise, and it makes it affordable to all your gear.

Another great bonus of Same Day Music is that they do not charge sales tax (unless you live in New Jersey).

Another Podcast About Podcasting

Last week’s episode on Freemium resources I talk about other Podcasts about Podcasting. Well I’ve been alerted to add The Podcasting Advisor (www.podcastingadvisor.com) to that list. This features Andy White of the Internet Marketing Podcast (a great podcast).