Pushing up premium sales on the top forums

There is a widely held belief among the partners that it’s impossible to make money off the popular top thematic forums. All they ever do is talk about how there used to be a lot of premium sales and now there is none. MoneyPlatform team conducted a comprehensive analysis of different partners’ work on the forums and provides practical and useful recommendations concerning the way one can profit off of them.

What actually influences the sales? The answer is simple and clear-cut – the content.

Content

This word can cause you pain, but the content you post is the key factor, which influences your sales, that’s a fact!

Let’s take films as a simple example (the same situation is with other types of content). In this case, the content is as follows: the title of your topic, the title of the film, the names actors and actresses, the title of the studio, categories/tags, the description of the film plot.

We conducted a statistical study on the influence of the content on the sales, based on the sales figures for several months.

Fig 1 shows that the maximum effect of the influence of tags is about 60 percent, but it is manifested only if there are a rather large number of them. The tags in the topic title and in the posts themselves were considered. It is a very interesting effect, for sure, but it doesn’t guarantee a sales boom.

The graph in Fig 2 is of great interest to us – one can see that Ratio increases by 350%, when the film description is increased to 100-200 characters. What film description is the best possible for 200-300 characters?

This volume should contain basic information about the film: the title, actresses and actors, studio and tags. Longer descriptions should contain information about the plot, which is often missing ?

90% of the posts from the top posters contain: the normal title of the film and file names of actresses and actors, tags – this was confirmed by a manual analysis of the posts with the highest sales on the popular forums.

Don’t be surprised at the lack of sales if you post content without a normal description in the topic “The best 2018”. Most likely, you’ll have random sales from users who got to your topic randomly as well. Indeed, you can post only links and automatically generated screenshots – this is the easiest way, but don’t rant about low sales.

Post date

The influence of posting frequency on sales is the second important aspect of forum posting, which we will study now.

20% of all sales occur on the day of posting. 40% of the total number of sales occur within the next 2 days. In 3 weeks, the chances of selling the file are significantly reduced, in case it wasn’t bought by this time. Perhaps, your file will never be found or bought, unless you made a quality description of it.

In order to keep your topics from drowning among others, you need to post on a regular basis – this is the main conclusion.

Search on the forum

A user has three options of finding your content:

● the user got to your thread from the search engine

● the user looks through forum threads manually

● the user used the search form on the forum

The first option is good only if you post a high-quality description of the content, but you should take into account the fact that this will work with a delay of several days. The second option is a regular posting on the forum. The third option, similar to the first one, doesn’t have an instantaneous effect. Further, we’ll consider the efficiency of the influence of the third option on sales.

The sales analysis of one of the popular forums showed that the sales carried out directly from the search page accounted for 50.5% of all sales. Unfortunately, we can’t track the user’s path from the search page to a certain topic and purchase, but we can assume that such sales account for 25-30%.

We managed to study the way the page number in search results influences the sales.

72% of all sales occur from the search form on the first page, 12% — from the second page, and 5% — from the third page. As far as you can see, high-quality descriptions and posting frequency influence the sales – search on forums works on these two indicators.

Conclusion

Let’s sum up our analysis and analytics. One of the most important factors of high sales is high-quality content, its criteria are as follows: the normal title of the film and file, names of actresses and actors, tags. The second major criterion is regular posting, your topics shouldn’t go down.

The next article will deal with the peculiarities of search work on the popular forum engines phpBB and vBulletin and fully cover the topic of making money on the popular forums.