Forum Marketing – Do It Right

Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 5:48 pm

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After not selling my niche blog, I’ve decided to keep it, and have been driving some traffic to it and making a few dollars in adsense income. Nothing spectacular, but I’m now seeing around 400 visits a month. So, to monetise it a bit better, I’m planning on writing a short report that fits the niche (again, it’s in the pet niche so I can do it quickly and well) and selling it from the blog. I’ll let you know how that goes as we go along.

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.