Advertizable Features??

[j1mmy]

If you were advertising to potential visitors why they should join your forum, what sort of things would you mention? I thought about mentioning the social groups feature and the idea of visitors of making their own social groups and attracting members, but I was going over the social groups earlier and its a pretty rubbish feature, and I don't think its appealing enough. What alternatives are there?

[j1mmy]

Bump

Any Ideas?

[Adrian Schneider]

Don't advertise features, advertise content.

Features is really only useful to niche communities where the competitors do not have the same features as you and it's worth switching communities, or joining new communities for them. One of the few examples I can think of this is clan management for gaming sites.

However, even then, listing the number of clans (or groups) that you do have is much more interesting and valuable than whether or not you can do it.

Show stats for the common things (members, posts, active people, etc.) The biggest selling point to new members is how active the site is, and how relevant the information on it is to them.

[j1mmy]

Well, my community is a niche community so advertising the features is perhaps a useful thing for me to do, I also haven't found other communities which are the same as me.

But I guess although people who visit my fourm have also been a member of other forums, I think I still need to give them a reason to join.

I am making these features apparent to them on a portal page.

[vbresults]

Originally Posted by Adrian Schneider

Don't advertise features, advertise content.

This. If you don't have the content to advertise, we know what the next step is, don't we?

Your content is the reason people join. If you trying to ignore that, your forum will fail or stagnate at it's current activity level.

P.S. Nobody cares about your features if the content is not attractive.

[j1mmy]

I see,

So, how would you go about advertising the content in a professional manner?

I have a portal page (homepage) which is independent from the forum, its a website on a wordpress system.

Do you mean providing a link of live threads?