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How Forums Help, Encourage and Inspire Members  

:: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 ::

How can a small business make use of online forums such as Cre8asiteForums? Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight"), an Administrator and Moderator at Cre8asiteForums, decided to find out.

"The example to use was an obvious choice, because one member has really stood out in her willingness to ask questions, to seek improvements, to learn from peers, and to listen, adapt and share."

In Caissa - Cre8asite Example of the Year 2003, you can read the interview between Ammon and Caissa. She describes how her business started out, its struggles and setbacks, and triumphs. It's an inspirational read for anyone wondering if it's all worth it some days.

Some snips:

There we sat (with great products, including top chess software & e-books), but moving along with few sales and no clear direction on how to move forward. Because it was so inexpensive to run a site, and because we do our web work internally, we decided to continue with ChessCentral.com, though we saw many established chess sites folding up. By 2002, the world economy was stagnant and our business had come to a standstill. It was time to look at finances and make some hard decisions. If these results continued we would be out of business by year’s end. We had to make something happen, and fast!

We knew that e-commerce and the Internet was the best bet to increase sales, but how? An aggressive reading program took us to Internet marketing articles, SEO, usability and web design. Using this new knowledge we redesigned the ChessCentral.com web site. Needing more information and working in the dark, we came acrossCre8asite forums . And that’s when things started to click.

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It didn’t take long to learn that if you build it and they do come, they may not buy. Converting a visitor to a customer is all about building trust. Would you give your money or credit card number to someone you didn’t trust?


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You've indicated a good mix of marketing techniques there. You've added to the value of the deal on the software with the free e-books, you've promoted your specialist e-book technology by giving them a taster, and you've provided good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) into the bargain.

Those different things are all working together, each boosting the strength of each other, and overall, boosting your brand and credibility. A great example of the holistic approach. It is very nicely done.

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We had to find a way to let chess players know we were the chess experts. This is where Cre8asite came in again. After reading threads on how to become an expert in your field, one of the ideas, opening a forum, seemed like it would be perfect for us. Enter - The Chess Exchange.

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This forum has its origins in a Yahoo Club started to help small business people just finding their way on the web. So Caissa's story has some special significance here to many of us.

The forums cover a lot of different ground, from usability, to SEO to design to internet law, programming, blogging , graphic design. One of my favorite sections, though, is the web site hospital, where people bring their sites, and get constructive criticism from people with a wide range of skills and knowledge and experience.

I want to point out that Caissa asked lots of questions, started topics when she wanted to ask for others opinions, and worked hard to achieve some success.

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Congratulations Caissa and Chess Central!

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Hot Thread:

Becoming an Authority - Recovering from Florida/Austin by Webby of Abakus

"Localrank is essentially all about the inter connectivity of pre-florida SERPs for a given keyword. It is believed to be based upon the top 1000 pages of the old serps, although I suspect it is likely to be less. What this means is that the results of the top pre-Florida SERPS (old algorithm) get put through a new filter which then forms the basis for the current SERPs. The localrank is calculated, in layman’s terms, by the amount of incoming links a website has from websites that were previously ranked well in the old SERPS. In other words, are websites on your theme/keyword that were previously well ranked, linking to you?"

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/11/2004 12:23:46 PM

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