Becoming and staying relevant in your niche

[Former Member]

How can you stay on top by becoming and staying relevant in your niche?
Follow these steps to help you achieve success.

Becoming Relevant

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To become relevant, you must ask these five(5) questions.  

• what is your niche is all about
  
• what is trending in your niche
  
• what are people talking about in your niche
• what is popular in your niche
• are people searching for topics on your niche

You must first answer all of these questions if you want to build a sustainable community of followers(and potential buyers).

So lets see if we can answer them. Lets try and do some tests to see if we could test the "james bond" niche.

what is your niche is all about ?
Well I presume your creating a forum because you have an interest and understanding about the topic/niche you will be creating a community for, right? You can also check other fan/wiki/official websites for additional information about the subject.  Never pick something that is too broad, "film/music/gaming" etc as most big companies already own the search engine(paid advertising) and social media space for those.  So you forum will most likely never be found. 


what is trending in your niche ?
We could use social media to see what is trending and we will but first, let me introduce you to google trends if your not already familiar.  If we type "James Bond" in the google trends search bar, we get provided with a chart of "interest over time", "regional interest" and "related searches".  The line chart is a little sporadic, this tells me the query is searched for seasonally, OR in our case I would take a guess and say it gets searched more often when a new movie comes out. Another thing I noted was in the "Related Searches" it gives me additional queries I could test. "james bond movies" sticks out to me as it is not as broad as "James Bond". 

what are people talking about in your niche ?
Lets see what the social networks are saying. I am just going to use #twitter in this test case, but you could test the others too.  So lets head over to twitter search and enter "James Bond" as our query. Well we know its relevant as people are talking about it. We kind of figured that, however your niche might not be so popular, so it may give you a better insight.

what is popular in your niche ?
A simple google search could tell us this, however we want to make sure we select the "News" tab and not the default "web". This will tell us what the media(news|papers) are saying about the subject. We can also come back here later and use this as inspiration for writing a new thread, why? It's relevant!

Remember when creating or curating content, its all opinion based, forums and blogs are all opinion based articles/threads. You don't need to copy an article but you can give your opinion on said article or story that is currently trending.  You then ask your viewers opinion on the thread you wrote, this then engages the viewer(people LOVE to be asked their opinion)

Are people searching for topics on your niche ?
If you are unsure if your niche is getting any hits in the search engines, you can first do a broad search. The tool we will be using is Google Keyword Tools There are many tutorials on how to use this tool on youtube.  

Our niche looks like a go, so for this we will create a fictional pro boards account and we will use "james bond movies" as our niche.  


URL: 
james-bond-movies.proboards.net
Please note this is a fictional url and is not working to my knowledge, apologies if any one is in fact using this url.

Before you go about setting up your new forum design, make sure you go over and create a gmail account(you will need this for console|keyword tools|analytics|alerts).

Next, head over to Google Alerts and create some alerts for you content.  In my case I would create alerts for 

James Bond
James Bond Movies
james-bond-movies.proboards.net

This will send me notifications to my gmail account every time those words are mentioned on the web! It helps me keep up to date with trending topics as well as anytime someone mentions the forum url.  

Design your forum how you will and be sure to create your console account and Analytics account(VERY IMPORTANT!!)
Be use to add the required "meta" tags and code to your templates.


Setting up Goals

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Google Analytics helps use track our pages as a whole but we can also create goals. Goals are helpful for teaching us how people are interacting on the forum. After we create a new thread and wish to share it, google will index it eventually!!!! We need to make some noise for them to take notice quicker. Google does not index websites, it indexes pages(threads/posts), so we must do this for each new page we create.

We make noise by getting people to talk about our new thread, we need Social Signals(likes|Shares) as well as back-links(other forums or blogs linking to the new thread). 

How do you do this? You need to build relationships with people. On Social Media, on Blogs Or Forums you comment on.
{ill talk about this further down}

So we need to share our new thread BUT we also want to track it.  I won't lie, this can be tedious as we need a new link for each social media|email|forum posts.  So in turn our one(1) new thread could have 5+ unique links for it.  Lets take a look.  Write down your thread link

james-bond-movies.proboards.net/threads/101/some-unique-content-people-will-love

 
and head over to   Link Builder and enter the details for each social media platform(you can also create one for emails) 

Campaign Source	facebook
Campaign Medium	social
Campaign Name	28-10-2015-facebook-some-unique-content-people-will-love
Website URL	james-bond-movies.proboards.net/threads/101/some-unique-content-people-will-love

Campaign Source	twitter
Campaign Medium	social
Campaign Name	28-10-2015-twitter-some-unique-content-people-will-love
Website URL	james-bond-movies.proboards.net/threads/101/some-unique-content-people-will-love

.....and so on, for each Social media platform.

After you create each of those links, write them down. They are way too long to post on twitter(for example) so we will use a url shorten service like Bitly but remember which link gets posted to which service.

Social Engagement

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In order to reach people to show your awesome new links to, you need to find them. Traffic is good but Targeted Traffic is better! People who are targeted are more likely to join your forum or add you as a friend/group.

Lets start with twitter.  Use the search functionality and search again for #yourniche. Look around at a few profiles and find out who is already popular. We are going to piggyback them. Head over to Tweepi and create and account. Find the "follow followers" option and enter their username @popularperson, now browse their friends and start following people who look to share the same interest(some could just be friends). You are capped at 200 a day, but do this everyday for a month and you should get quite a few follow backs(targeted followbacks, people who will have an interest in your forum).


Reaching People

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Don't EVER try to sell something OR force someone to look at your url, Social Media is for socializing alone! You will reach people eventually and start building relationships. 

PICTURES are essential for social media so be prepared to get your hands dirty.  If you are inept at creating graphics, you could try a service like Canva 


Good luck guys and gals! I wish your forums all the best.

[nariadreaming]

@joecool111 I thought you could benefit from reading these tips

[Former Member]

interesting, i just got up so i'll read alittle later

[Former Member]

Some great tips. Thanks for posting, just read it all.

[Former Member]

Well, thats how I gained 300 Twitter followers, it was a slow process, but it's working. I actually got followed by a few blue check marks too! Especially a youtuber with 3.2 millions subs.

I gained 65 followers in 3 months on Twitch (out of 68, I only had 3 followers when I started.) Plus doing giveaways really benefit for this as well. Making great friends along the way. Streamed with a bigger streamer quite a few times too (meaning I was in their group calls with a few other bigger ones playing the same game)

Keeping at it is the best thing to do. Anyone can do their dream job if they keep at it! I can't tell you how much I make just for playing games, but it's enough to help support what I need. It's nothing spectacular but it's enough.

If something is in your way push it out of your way. I did, I quit walmart and started this up, and I am happier than i have ever been in a job! (Not saying you should follow me in that situation. I had something to fall back on)

But life is funny in the way, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You got to hit it at the right spot.

[Former Member]

Thanks for the feedback @1mako and @ncbean

I'm looking to re-write this topic and go a little more in depth with it.
I'm considering doing a "your first two weeks as a forum owner kind of thing",

Week 1
day 1 - this is what you should do type of thing

I would like to go more into using the tools(with pictures) if people are interested
and I may even setup a full forum as a test bed so people can see actual progress over the weeks/months on a real forum.

If people would like to see that, hit the like button

[wildmaven]

Oct 18, 2016 14:01:22 GMT -8 @synthtec said:

Thanks for the feedback @1mako and @ncbean

I'm looking to re-write this topic and go a little more in depth with it.

I would love to see you do that in the new Managing Your Forum board here on Support. It would be a great addition!

[Former Member]

Thanks wildmaven,

I'm giving it serious consideration.

[vulpes]

I really enjoy the depth of this! Thank you.

[Philip]

your welcome maybe some other forums might employ those rules.