Promoting your website in forums is a highly underused way of getting traffic to your website. Although many people have great traffic results from participating in online forums, the majority of internet marketers are still neglecting the unique power that forums have. Most internet forums allow you to have a signature file which is a small box that appears at the end of every comment that you make. This is the key to gaining traffic through forums because this resource box is usually allowed one or two links with a small description beside them. If your comments and posts are useful, answer questions and are generally a positive influence on that forum then it is likely that other forum members will notice this and click on your website link to find out if you have any more to offer them. Seeing as the majority of these will be forum members and therefore interested in your website topic, you know that if your sales letter is persuasive and well written that you are very likely to make a sale. There are a few important things to bear in mind before you embark on your forum marketing campaign. These are : - Make sure you pick good and relevant forums to post in. The forums that you post in should be specifically focused on the same subject as that of your website. This way you can tell that those who will be reading your comments will be interested in what you have to say. Whats also very important is that you choose forums that have a decent number of visitors every month. Forum posting is a time consuming task and so you want to concentrate your efforts on 5 forums with large amounts of traffic rather than 20 forums with minimal traffic each. You can tell how many visitors a forum gets by looking at the views that each thread has got, seeing how far up in the search engines it comes or looking at its Alexa traffic rankings. - Save time by posting similar messages in different forums. With the amount of forums out there you can guarantee that there will be similar questions being repeated over and over on different forums. If you do a Google Search on this question and find there are 10 forums with outstanding threads asking exactly the same thing, you could write a response to one of them and virtually copy and paste (make slight alterations) into all 10 of these forums. - Try and answer peoples questions. Forums are a lot of peoples last resorts if they are having particular trouble finding something out or accomplishing something. If you can provide them with the answer then it is very likely they will be so grateful that they will rush to your site and consider buying. It may sound crazy, but if you come up with the answer to someones big problem, they are almost definitely going to want to pay you back. - Post on threads which have the most number of views and comments. In basically every forum there are a couple of threads which have expanded to several pages because the topic of that thread is something hot or there is an argument going on between to members. These are definitely the threads you need to post in to get the maximum exposure. If you can give your opinion and back it up with sensible reasoning, you will gain the respect of those reading and they may look to your signature file to see what your website does. - Never post useless comments. The number one way to get banned from a forum is through spamming it; basically contributing nothing to the forum and contributing for the sole purpose of promoting your website. Anyway, not only will you get banned, you will also get no website views because members will think the bad quality of your posts represents the quality of your website. Always re-read your post before you submit it, and wonder if you were reading it for the first time whether you would be enticed to click on that posters link in his or her signature file. The answer to this should always be yes. |
