I am just getting started and want my WordPress site to have several features:
1. a forum for customers to make suggestions, give praise, feedback, etc.
2. a repository of third party articles
3. a number of how-to videos.
4. a gallery of images
5. a newsletter
How do I proceed?
Forums
I would stay away from forums for now at least as
a) it is a considerable amount of work to moderate the posts; and
b) you probably do not have a big enough list right now to make a forum interesting enough – instead use the WordPress TDO forms plugin which allows ‘guest posts’ that you can choose either to approve automatically or not.
Once you have a critical mass of over a hundred active members then it would be appropriate to look at forums again.
Article Repository
I would tend to have original higher quality content on your main site. Be careful of filling up your main site with lots of content that is found elsewhere on the web. You can use free wordpress.com blogs for the respun articles and videos and then add deep keyword rich links in to your main site.
Video Repository
How-To Videos are a great idea – but don’t try and host them on your own site – upload the video instead onto YouTube.com or WordPress.Tv, Amazon S3 or Simple CDN depending on the quality you require. Then all you need to do is embed the content in a post on your site.
Images Galleries and Slideshows
D13Slideshow, Featured Content Gallery and NextGEN are all WordPress plugins that can be suitable for your image gallery.
List Building and Newsletters
In order to have a newsletter you need to start building a list of potential clients. Create and give away useful free reports to induce your clients to give you their email address and sign up to your monthly newsletter and autoresponders. In the newsletter give your readers good information. This will encourage them to stay in contact with you until they are ready to buy. We recommend Aweber as a reliable newsletter and autoresponder delivery agent. They give a snippet of HTML code that you can include either in a text widget or using custom code in the header of the page.