Introduction to the vBulletin Board

Benefits of a Discussion Board

Here are just a few of the advantages of having a discussion forum on your site:

•A relatively quiet forum generates a steady stream of new content on your site—this means that people visit your site more regularly in order to read the new content. You can find out interests and preferences directly from your website visitors, enabling you to target content more specifically to their needs.

•A discussion forum allows people to become more than just passive observers of your site. It allows visitors to pose a question, post a comment or share a review. When someone posts something, they come back to see whether there's been an answer or comment posted in response. This is how a community begins and is a path to site growth.

•A discussion board quickly creates a pool of knowledge on your site, especially if you have a website that is devoted to a particular subject or topic.

•Due to the diverse nature of discussion forum posts, you end up with a lot on your website. This means that you get entries in search engines for a wide variety of topics and search criteria, which will very effectively improve your overall ranking.

•Each member on your forum is a pair of eyes—you can sell advertising space on popular forums based on good membership levels and revisiting statistics. The bigger the forum, the more you can charge!

•A forum is a great way to build a circle of friends with similar interests.

•A forum is a great way to support a commercial product or service—you find that other members answer questions for you! It's also a low cost solution, and you quickly develop a handy knowledge base of information.

Why vBulletin?

Let's be clear from the start—vBulletin does far more than build a discussion area. vBulletin is a complete solution to the community needs of website owners. It's a commercial product (as opposed to a free product), which perhaps rules it out for the smaller, more low-key websites. (Although if they have an eye to future growth, then they might do well in choosing a product that will grow with them right from the start.)

The commercial advantage

One great feature of vBulletin is the exceptional level of support that the developers provide—if you run into trouble, you can expect to receive support in a matter of a few hours (sometimes minutes).

Another big feature of vBulletin is that because of its popularity there are a huge number of add-ons and modifications available, some commercial but many available free. This means that you need not be stuck with a discussion board that looks, feels, and behaves like all the other discussion boards on the Web.

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