One of the methods I’m using to drive traffic to the blog is forum marketing.

Basically, what you do is find a forum which talks about your niche, register and start posting useful comments, with a link to your website in your signature.  This gets your site in front of people who are definitely interested in your niche. Sounds easy, but so many marketers just post rubbish in the forums to get a link back to their website, and hope people visit their site. This doesn’t win you any friends, and may get you banned from the forum for good.

To do it right, firstly check the forum rules to make sure a signature link is allowed. Some allow links to personal sites but not to commercial sites. This can be a bit of a grey area – my niche is a particular health issue in cats, so although it was built as a commercial site, it can be interpreted as a personal site, especially since I’m a vet. Either way, the forums I’ve registered at don’t seem to have a problem with the signature link.

Secondly, when you reply to a post, make it worth reading. Answer a question, offer your own experiences, or add more information to the other posts in the thread. Posts saying “I agree”, especially from a newbie to the forum, aren’t well regarded.

How do you know when you’re doing it right? I’ve just received a reply to one of my posts in a forum that said, “Hi ****,  welcome to the forum. I notice you keep giving valuable advices… thank you and God bless. I also like your **** site, have bookmarked it. ”

I don’t think anyone will be too unhappy to hear from me in that forum, and each post has a link to my site in the signature. That’s forum marketing at its best. Try it, you’ll no doubt see some increase in traffic very quickly.

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing – Part 1
2. Affiliate Marketing – Part 2
3. Get Website Traffic To Your Blog

There are plenty of methods you can use to get website traffic to your Blogger blog. Some you pay for,but since we’re on a budget we’ll be looking at free methods.

Traffic generation is such a big subjectthat it could have a blog of its own, so we’ll just take a look at some of the more common ones.

Firstly, you need to optimise your blog so the search engines can find it easily. This basically involves creating interesting and unique content based on keywords that you know are searched for.

Find some busy forums that relate to your niche, and check if you’re allowed to put a link in your signature. If so, join the forum and make sure you contribute useful posts. If you appear to have joined just to promote your own site, you’ll be labelled a spammer. This is particularly good at helping you get website traffic that’s specifically interested in your niche.

You can use article directories to get website traffic – these are websites which contain lots of articles that webmasters can use on their sites or in their newsletters. The authors of these articles include a bio box at the bottom of the article, which contains their name and a few details, as well as their website url. When a website owner reproduces the article, they must include the bio box. Their readers will then hopefully visit the author’s site. You can rewrite your most popular blog posts and submit them to article directories. Again, this can get website traffic that’s redirected to you from a site in the same niche. Some popular article directories are Ezinearticles and Articledashboard. Another article directory, Associated Content, will pay you for your content.

The third simple and free method to get website traffic to your blog is to comment on other blogs, and include your url. This will create backlinks to your blog, which again will help make it popular with the search engines. Some blogs have a little piece of html code inserted, which makes the search engines not include the link back to your site when working your site’s popularity. Obviously, to make sure you get website traffic from the time you spend commenting on blogs, you need to be able to tell which blogs have the nofollow code in them. There’s a neat little piece of software called Fast Blog Finder, which is free, and can be downloaded from here. You type in your keywords, and it will return a list of blogs and indicate which are dofollow and which are nofollow blogs. The free version only returns 50 blogs, but it’s a start. Another similar piece of software is Real Link Finder. It too is free. Have a look at both, give them a try, get your comments on those dofollow blogs and get website traffic to your new site.

Don’t forget to ping your blog each time you add a new post. No, that doesn’t mean you flick it with your finger! A blog can use a pinging service such as Ping O Matic, to tell the search engines that the blog has been updated. Go to Ping O Matic, key in your blog home page, and tick “check common” on the services to ping tab. Click “send pings” and it’s done.

We’ll dig further into how to get website traffic in greater detail in future posts, but if you start with this list, you should see some results.

Related posts:

1. How To Create A Blog With Blogger.
2. How To Choose A Website Host
3. The Importance Of Good Graphics For Your Website
4. Build Your Website With WordPress