10,000 Website Traffic Blueprint: Forum Marketing Tips, Tricks and Techniques

10,000 Website Traffic Blueprint: Forum Marketing Tips, Tricks and Techniques

What is forum marketing?

Do you know that forum marketing is one of the most untapped traffic generation strategy on the internet world? Internet forums have big potentials for leads and amazing customers. But you need to understand that just simply having a signature under your every post isn’t going to give you all the sustainable traffic that you will need to drive sales for your business rather you need to understand some tips, tricks and techniques to employ so as to make use of forums.

Forum!  What’s a Forum? It’s simply a website where you have users of different niches/passion/walks of life interacting, responding to discussions and comments thereby helping each other and sharing experiences.

The king of internet information defines Forum viz:  “An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Wikipedia”

Now you understand what a forum is and also you know that it can be a means of getting constant traffic to your website. We need to get down to business.

How to Get Started

These four strategies will lay the foundation for your making the most out of internet forums all over the world to attract targeted traffic to your website!

1. Finding the Right Forum in Your Website Niche Market:

The first this first step toward achieving lasting success in forum marketing. I want to say here that not all forums are worth your scarce time. Successful forum marketing means you are going to fight the right forum/community for your business. That’s the singular reason you are going to look for popular forums- A simple search on Google “top 10 forums in “Fix Country name here” i.e. Top 10 forum in Nigeria will tell you which forums have more persons interacting and discussing.  In your search you need to take note of the following

• Search and register for forums with at least 50,000 members and at least 100,000-1mil posts. – You know why? A forum that has more activity will better your forum marketing efforts. If you are marketing to a large number you have better results compared to marketing to just a small number.
• Next thing you need to look out for is that the forum has daily new posts. Yes, daily activity. A forum can have bots as members and so many posts like the 100,000 I talked about in the previous post and that’s all… No human interaction on a daily basis. This is not good for your marketing.
• Also you need to check out to make sure the forum don’t have so much spam(e.g. Too much of repeated posts,) and I must mention that you can also spread your tentacles and avoid direct competitors(forums hosted by them)

2.  Creating your dedicated Online Forum Accounts

The next thing you do after finding at least 5-10 forums you will use for your forum marketing campaigns is to set up your accounts right away. Don’t wait till it’s too late to register an account because in online forums seniority matters. So register early.

You need to start thinking long term strategy. Think of it as a permanent channel or medium of growing your business. This is also a way of you building relationships, establishing your brand authority in the online space.

3. Staying with the rules

One thing that is very important that you need to take note of is that every forum have rules and guidelines or what you call regulations. You need to read the rules and guidelines carefully, it can be tempting to scan through it but don’t do that. Take out 5-10 minutes and study it- don’t forget you want to do forum marketing for a long while. E.g.

• Can users post randomly within minutes?
• Can users promote their personal business?
• Are there restrictions for new registrations?
• Are there special privileges if you are old member with (months, age badges)?
• Can you put adverts on your signature line?

 4. Usernames, Signature, Avatar and Introducing Yourself

Your forum usernames and avatar (picture representing you) is the foremost thing that users get to see when they see your handle.  There are some rules which makes a whole lot of sense- Use nice usernames that will be easy to remember and that users can use to identify you. If possible also use actual picture of yourself or your corporate brand image (logo). Also don’t forget to create a nice appealing user profile of yourself.

*** Tricks to getting Amazing Traffic

• Answering Questions: Many people ask lots of questions on forums. So one way to get backlinks to your website is to look for questions that is related to what you do and give answers to them while linking back to an elaborate solution/product/service on your website. That is not to say that you do that every time. Always have a way to balance it and be very innovative in this approach or marketing and getting traffic to your website.
• Linking to Old posts: You might have old posts on your website that are still relevant. Yes, it doesn’t hurt to share them on forums.
• Creating a contest or giving out freebies: This has really worked well for me.

See an example of a post I created on a forum in 2011: http://www.nairaland.com/764655/kaspersky-internet-security-2011-2012#9188235

This post still gives me clients till today. That’s the amazing power of giving out free stuffs, don’t forget that while giving out free stuffs you are telling your competitors you are an authority, leader plus you will get more value far more than what you have given out.

Most times when I need fast traffic I look for something worthwhile and give out- but the item to be given out will be on my website- Amazing secret (win-win strategy for both the winner and the giver- website traffic from all interested persons)

N.B:  Just do some thinking about these strategies and others in your head. You will be glad the number of website traffic you can get off internet forums to your website on a weekly basis with minimum efforts.

 Caution when using forums

Yes, there is a caution when using forums to do marketing for your business or website, I need to state this: Many internet marketers try to use low-skilled local or foreign workers to spam forum (posting without planning and really following the guidelines provided above). I really hope that this is not the type of marketing that you want for your business. Forum spamming can bring in few temporary traffic to your websites- even in their thousands, but on the long term, these links and campaign can seriously damage your online reputation.

What’s the solution?

Hire a social media or a Digital marketing expert manager, make sure they understand that you will only prefer white hat strategies and techniques that will not only give you awesome traffic but also give your brand a nice image to readers.

Note that you must create a nice landing page i.e. the page where visitors from the banner will come to on your website so that you can maximize your click through rate.

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