website, web-developmentI have just started a web design company in Sri Lanka.
Is it a good or bad idea to add a forum to it?
The forum would be all about web design and development tutorials, questions, ideas about make money online, social media marketing tips, etc.
My target is getting some projects via my forum.
Unless your forum is localized - for people who only read and write Sinhalese or Tamil (those who have no instant access to forums in English) - there might be no sense for creating your own. Even more, there’s no worse social thing as empty forum. Empty forum, or posts which are months old, show that there’s no related company activity and it has troubles with business.
I want to propose you another thing - find a set of most popular forums on the subject, and participate in them. Position yourself as e.g. “Kumar Patel (SLWS)” - put your name and company name here (I took name of Kumar Patel and company name Sri Lanka Web Services), create good description of your profile saying that you provide services in Sri Lanka and India or anything else which would distinguish you from others.
There’re some other ways to get such business which is not tied to location - e.g. Upwork.
So your thought is, a forum on your website may be a good way of getting customers. Let’s break that down into cases.
CASE 1 My website gets traffic, but no leads. Is a forum a good idea to turn the traffic into leads?
If this is where you are, there’s a sub-case where a forum could be great. If people are spending time on your site and viewing several pages, and you’ve provided a low friction way to connect but people aren’t using it, you may need a way to draw people in. My first choice personally would be a free eBook download, or a free email tip series. That’s a little more work up front, but scaling is easy. But a forum can be a great way to build your content, so if you have time and skill, why not!
CASE 2 My website gets no traffic. Is a forum a good idea to get traffic, so I can get leads?
No. Traffic mainly comes because you pay for it, because you work hard to get high up in search engine rankings, or because you work hard to get your name and links to your site out there.
If you have a forum, you need traffic, and you need time to build up the content. In other words, building a forum doesn’t address your problem. In fact, it makes your problem worse.
CASE 3 There’s no forum in Sri Lanka covering web design. Is it a good idea to create one, and will it bring me leads?
Maybe. But there’s a risk that putting the two together won’t work.
In this case, I’d try and think of “Sri Lankan Web Business Forum” as a startup project you’re interested in pursuing. MVP may be a landing page with a signup to request an invitation code. Set yourself an objective - 100 requests resulting in a confirmed email address in 6 weeks, say. Then go out to promote that page.
If you get no interest (or discover that there’s already a go-to place that meets people’s needs), then you don’t launch the forum, but you do have a handful of people who are expecting a forum and maybe with care you can engage and turn some of them into leads.
If you get enough interest, you have some confidence that you’re meeting a need. So you go further - build the private beta site and bring in the first users. There are lots of resources out there for guidance on how to build membership sites from scratch.
If that goes well, then you can start to think of the project as a potential business in its own right, and you can start to work on the best ways to leverage your involvement.
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