Using Vumpost to Automate Your Discussion Forum

Posted on January 22nd, 2008

You really CAN set up and new, pre-populated discussion forum within an hour!

In case you are new to this site and did not know, I like testing new software, especially programs that help make our business lives easier. One of the packages I am testing now is called Vumpost. Maybe you have heard of it, maybe not.

Vumpost is a program that allows you to pre-populate a discussion forum with content from Yahoo! Answers. Think of it as a jump-start to your discussion forum. Here are some things I like and dislike about the software.

What I like About Vumpost:

Launching a new forum on practically any topic, can be created and populated with hundreds of posts within an hour.
The discussions are automatically put into the categorizes you set up and define in the software settings.
Unlimited categories can be created on the same forum, or you can launch unlimited forums on separate sites and all of them can be populated using this software.
Even though the people who started the discussion are not members of your forum and may not see the responses, you can still continue those discussions with participation from other members.
Topic-based discussion forums, especially those with many discussions, are great for SEO!
New discussions can be added every week and even automated if your web host allows cron tasks. That way it is completely hands-off and automatically adds all the new discussions from the previous week!

What I Do Not Like About Vumpost:

The people who started the discussions are not members of your forum.
Those people may never see your responses (see above for alternative).
If you make a mistake importing the discussions and do it again, you essentially double up on the ones you put in the first time. This can be avoided by researching your keywords BEFORE updating your import settings. I learned that the hard way.
Even though there are responses to each topic, the number of views is initially zero. That means someone would have responded without viewing it? Weird, but how many people truly base their decision on reading and participating by how many viewed it? I go by the content and how many responded.
You will have all those discussions and initially only YOU as a member.

Overall, the software works great! You can see the results on the forum I created for the test. It automatically ads new discussions every week on autopilot. I just set it up once and watch it grow. Feel free to register and participate. Go to http://forum.affref.com

When you are ready to launch your own forum, check out Vumpost to see how it can help your discussion forum get active fast.

Until next time, I hope to see you at the TOP of the search engines!

Jim Hutchinson
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Jim Hutchinson is the Project Manager for Website Managers. He has studied Internet Marketing from some of the most influential leaders. Many of those resources are available on Affiliate Referral Sources.
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