New Forum Strategy

[Vladamir]

Hello Everyone,

I have a website I have put considerable time and effort into in a niche well use biking as an example for discussions purposes. The biking website provides guidance articles, reviews and lots of knowledge. I am looking to create a forum for it.

My site(renamed for anonymity) www.bikerguide.com
GOAL -> Add a forum to the money site

In my market research I have identified some competitors. When searching for hypothetically "Bike Forum" (bike is not the keyword, replaced for anonymity) these are the top results:

[TABLE="width: 500"]
[TR]
[TD]#[/TD]
[TD]Website[/TD]
[TD]Alexa Rank[/TD]
[TD]SEM Value[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.bikeforum.com/[/TD]
[TD]902,000[/TD]
[TD]229[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.mountainbiker.com[/TD]
[TD]306,000[/TD]
[TD]6854[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.biking.net/message/[/TD]
[TD]79,000[/TD]
[TD]75532[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.mountainbikingnz.com/forum/[/TD]
[TD]681,000[/TD]
[TD]7[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.bikeff.net/forum/[/TD]
[TD]521,000[/TD]
[TD]1[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.jaxmountainbiking.com/phpBB/[/TD]
[TD]802,000[/TD]
[TD]974[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.texasmountainbiking.com/forum/[/TD]
[TD]456,000[/TD]
[TD]20657[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]http://www.bikeaus.com.au/forum/[/TD]
[TD]369,000[/TD]
[TD]4[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


From looking at these I can tell some results are showing alexa of the whole site rather then the suburl but some sites like @2 are legitimate competitors with decent search traffic. Forums are an entity that warrant alot of interaction so search traffic does not necessarily mean much since alot of users may be return users and the site may be very high traffic without much search traffic due to interaction. Also the reason I wanted to start this project is all the forums from the competitors are either segmented to mountain biking for example or the general ones are very badly made and ugly and bad for usability so I see a bit of a niche for a good general biking forum.

Looking at the naming schemes I think my best bet would be to do one of two plans for a domain

#1 - internal forum
www.bikerguide.com/forum/ + forum.bikerguide.com
#2 - new url forum
www.bikersforum.com (moneysite will link to this forum)

Content strategy

Short term - I am considering starting with 4 sections in the short term
1. General Discussion
2. Off Topic
3. Ask The Expert!
4. Mountain Biking

Content will be created by me at a rate of about 4 posts per day one per section. The ask an expert will be the prime content it will be a forum question i take from one of the other forums and rewrite and answer with my expertise making a long detailed answer. The answer will then be taken from the forum and posted as an article on the money site.
(Is there any issue having the same answer on both pages? Does that run the risk of content duplication slaps? I know if I do not make a new domain it will be less of a problem since its duplicated on my own site. I have also heard duplication is not an issue as long as you put your duplicate content in quotes and link back to the original source?

Medium term - Expansion into deeper categories, sub categories and more

Blackhat Strategies (debating feasibility)

1. Automatic Posting Bot - found a few topics about this, a bot that automatically posts on topics using some AI, could not find a working one
2. Scrape other forums and duplicate content - "cScrape - vBulletin 3 & 4 RSS feed scraper & poster" Basically, all cScrape does is allows you to add your own forum databases, RSS feeds to external forums, and it will scrape the threads and first page of replies within each link of the feed and use fake usernames as posters. It also comes with a built-in spinner that you can enable or disable if you want. Does anyone have any experience with using this? Is this google panda friendly, will I get any slaps for the duplicate content? (might help to have the forum be a seperate linking site incase it gets google slapped?
3. Pay a virtual assistant from india to make posts - This could get expensive


Marketing Strategies

Short term - No marketing short term, grow the sites content and hope the link from money site drives traffic to the forum
medium term - possible contests for article of the month best written article