In my experience, forums tend to be a mixed bag. On one hand, they allow for direct interaction with prospects on their terms (unlike with blogs where you control the topics and basically start mini-discussions) – which is great.

On the other hand, they are no means easy to get up and running with an active community, which means you are doing a lot of the posting and encouraging everyone you know to participate for the first few weeks/months since no one likes posting to an empty forum. Like with blogs, unless you have really interesting content, people generally post a few times then leave, so keeping people active can be challenging as well.

It’s a bit easier if you already have an active community of participants on your current blog or website – and forums can be great if you get tons of blog comments and want to take the discussion to a new medium for somewhat better management. Of course, like with blogs, the drawback is that you will also get a lot of spammers, trolls and automated scripts that try to hijack your forum, so you do need someone to moderate.

The best forums I’ve been part of have been in paid membership sites where everyone has an incentive to keep the discussion high quality because we’re all paying a monthly fee to network/mastermind with one another.

I’ve really never tried using a forum specifically for lead generation, but I guess if you post informational content, then funnel people back to your site, it might work. As with any marketing tactic, I’d recommend testing it for a few months and seeing what kind of results you get. If it works, great!

One inexpensive lead generation idea we’re toying with is the inclusion of a discussion forum alongside our blog. Any thoughts on this strategy? Thanks…

Forum = http://philadelphiarealestatehub.com/phroperty

Blog = http://philadelphiarealestatehub.com