DIY Portal: MESSAGE BOARD

INCREASE SALES AND BOOST CUSTOMER LOYALTY WITH A VIBRANT ONLINE COMMUNITY!

Online community that reaches out to prospects with similar needs can play a very important role in arousing awareness and interest in your products or services. These highly qualified prospects will then be more receptive to seek more information about your products and make purchases subsequently. Get our Message Board today and add interactivity to your site instantly!

List Price: $29

WHY DO WE NEED TO BUILD AN ONLINE COMMUNITY?

Many industry experts believe that e-tailers should strike strategic alliances with Web conglomerates such as Microsoft, Yahoo! or America Online to capitalize on their financial muscles and cross-selling abilities to create profitable Web businesses. The phrase "cross-selling ability" hinted at the importance of building a large online community to support online selling in the long runs.

Both Yahoo! and America Online started out as an information portal providing value-added information and resources to millions of users who flock to their sites every month. Online shopping was offered at a later stage to capitalize on their ability to reach out to a large group of online citizens.

The logic is simple. People want to belong to a community, and commerce will flourish in places where a community settles in. Net citizens exhibit the same social behavior when they are surfing the cyberspace. So, contrary to the business models adopted by most e-businesses, we should devote considerable effort on developing an online community to complement and support online selling.

An ideal community or web portal should cater to a particular lifestyle or appeal to a specific age or social group. We can offer free services, information, games and entertainment as well as an avenue for members to participate in community's events and social activities. The list can change all the times, as long as it entices members to return to your Website regularly. E-commerce will flourish when our website has evolved into an effective medium for reaching out to a specific target audience.

ADVANTAGES FOR YOUR SMALL ONLINE BUSINESS:

The development of a vibrant online community is a very important prelude to the success of your small online business. You can specialize in a specific market niche and fine-tune your information, services and product offerings to serve your target audience better. Size does not matter if you have the right strategy and business model in place. Adopting this approach offers an online merchant the following advantages:

You can start small without incurring a sizeable amount of capital investment and use your advertising revenue to help finance your e-tail operations.
You can market your products to a captive market without having to rely on aggressive advertising and promotion to bring in the traffic.
An online community dedicated to a specific target audience can play a very important role in arousing its members' awareness and interest in specific products and services. These qualified prospects will be more receptive to seek information about related products and make purchases subsequently.
Most people buy on impulse when something catches their fancy unintentionally. An online community with an e-tail operation can pose teaser ads to its audience regularly to induce impulse shopping.

HOW TO BUILD A VIBRANT ONLINE COMMUNITY?

America Online has created one of the most successful online conferences and forums in the world. "The key is to reach out to people and be there for them when they reach out to you," wrote George Thornally, AOL's original Forum Leader for seven years since its beginning. "To this end, forum leaders and volunteers should embrace a noble belief that they are giving their services freely to advance humanity and help mankind." He had written a book - "AOL BY GEORGE! The Inside Story of America Online" - to reveal the inside story of how the AOL community was developed in the early days.

Interactive Internet applications such as chat rooms and message boards are essential tools for building a vibrant online community. But they are nothing if you do not have dedicated forum leaders and volunteers to champion the forum's cause and objective. These people are not motivated by money. They want to share and be appreciated for their times and efforts. That is why I incorporate a Point Award System into the Message Board to recognize members' efforts. It works as follows:

A new member will be issued some points upon registration. You can preset the points to be awarded to new members.
He can raise any topic and offer to award 0-10 points for the best responses to his topic. Offering a higher award will encourage more responses. Likewise, he will earn points by providing good answers to other members' topics.
Members who have accumulated a certain number of points will be featured in the message board's Panel with a profile write-up and photograph.

Awarding points to show your appreciation for a good response helps to build trust and compassion among the members. The benefits do not stop here. Our message board is equipped with multiple features that let you build a first-class online community at a small fraction of the software development costs. Some of the features are listed as follows:

You can change the message board's color, font and dimension to suit your site's look and feel. Web pages generated by the message board script will retain your header, sidebar and footer in accordance with your HTML page format.
Visitor to the board will be prompted to register as a user prior to posting response or new topic. A registered user can place any topic on his watch list. He will then be alerted by email whenever there is a response posted to his watched topic.
Administrator can access a password-protected area to delete offensive topics, edit inappropriate messages and upload member's profile and photograph to the Panel.

Most application service providers charge thousand of dollars to develop a commercial-class message board like ours. We are not going to charge anywhere close to that because we want everyone who is serious about developing a great Web site to have it. You can now have it for just $29. So, what are you waiting for? Get your own message board today!

List Price: $29

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All prices quoted in US dollars