Your Opinions Please

There is no doubt that a forum is an important aspect for many successful sites. It encourages a bit of interactivity among members and helps create a sense of community.

A forum isn't the only way to encourage this however. Other very successful sites understand the importance of allowing specific feedback on the particular content that is being viewed by the visitors.

If you consider Amazon.com for example. They allow people to review products on the site and give their feedback based on their experiences.

This serves several purposes. It shows people that:

• their opinion counts
• they can learn more about the topic from others who have experienced it before them

Applying It To Your Site

Getting feedback from specific articles on your site isn't that hard to do. In fact, it can be very similar to a signup page for an autoresponder. Instead of sending the information to an autoresponder service, it can be sent directly to you.

Since my two membership sites run on Membergate, I take advantage of its built in form builder. It allows me to create the fields that I want and then it will email me the results.

Here is an online video showing the form builder for Membergate.

I have recently starting applying this to the Marketingyourdvd.com site. You can see a screen shot here of it in place. This one was an article on common pricing mistakes DVD producers make:

Automating The Code

Once I decided on a look and feel that I wanted my feedback forms to appear as, I decided to automate things a bit.

I created a macro to easily insert the feedback form on any article when I am writing them. I simply type in: ==feedback and my computer instantly types out the code necessary to have the form appear on the page.

Results

The form has already encouraged some good feedback from the members of that site. This feedback has included:

• personal experiences that the members wanted to share on that particular article
• suggestions for other articles in the future

On the form, I give them the option of keeping the suggestions private or they can give permission for them to be appended onto the article. I review the submissions as they come in and take the appropriate action with the feedback.

As the results have been so good thus far, I will be adding a similar feedback form to this site as well.

You may have wondered why I start with the newer site first. Basically it boiled down not having to append it to as many articles! Since the SmallBusinessWebSite.com has 300+ articles, it would take me a while to add them all. I will start off by adding it from this point forward.

So with that in mind...

IMPORTANT:Feedback or comments please!

This site thrives from the collective experiences of all of our members. That includes your experiences. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts or experiences with this topic.

• Do you have any good tips to encourage site visitor feedback?
• Do you have suggestions for a future article?

Please share your thoughts here and I will append them to the article for the benefit of other members of the site:

Your Comments Please!
Comment or Question
It is ok to append this comment to this page if appropriate
No, please keep my comment private