Website owners are always looking to increase traffic. More traffic often means more sales. Whilst it’s important to measure your ROI and not just get traffic for traffic’s sake, there are huge opportunities in forum marketing. We will give you one example that generates tons!
Forums. Wait. Don’t leave yet. The traffic out there is huge!
There is normally an internet forum for most niches. If your business is insurance, there are plenty. If your business is tropical fish, there are also plenty. So, here are six steps to promote your business using internet forums
- Identify
Choose the forum that you’re going to participate in. One great resource for this is BigBoards – they provide statistics, broken down by topic that show high traffic forums. Or try, this Google search to find more forums. - Introduce
Be honest, open and helpful. Introduce yourself to become one of the locals. Most forums have strict ethical policies. You can’t just dive in a fill posts with links – you will be banned very, very quickly. So, make an impression with something unique and helpful. - Create a Compelling Profile and Signature
Your signature will appear below each post and each reply. Use this to your advantage to advertise your site and who you are. Add information about yourself and build up your profile page. This helps others know more about you - Don’t Spam
Be courteous and helpful to others. The moneysavingexpert forums are huge. People like Tim Deegan use this to their advantage to offer advice, tips and help on buying beds. Surely you can do the same in your market? But, don’t spam or you will be banned. - Be Brave, Be Helpful
Offer help first. Provide full disclosure and you will find that you become trusted in the forum fairly quickly. - Be Active
This is your industry, you should be passionate about it. So, post replies, create new threads or even just get something off your chest. Build up a rapport with another member that you get on with. Expand your network.
The traffic is out there and if you’re not using forums now. Go ahead, sign up and create a profile. Start contributing to the community and you’ll be amazed at the traffic.
Call to Action: Let us know in the comments how you are getting on with forum marketing.
Capital One
Credit Made Clearer
lovemoney
Relationship with Your Money
CashQuestions
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Life Cover
Insurance Made Easy
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I find that forum moderators are extremely hawk eyed when new people join and whether they are spammers. They just get so many spammers I expect they frown upon any advertising at all from new members.
Another Google search query to find forums on specific topics.
Example: “powered by vbulletin” +intitle:car
Replace what is inside the quotes for a common footer footprint for other forum platforms to find more forums.
@emma, we’re not advocating spamming. We’re suggesting you reach out to your community.
@Ed, Thanks for the tip
Interesting read, it would be great to have more of this sort of thing here.
Adam
Many forums have suffered from SEO spammers and sellers of sex/pharmaceutical products for a long time. So you can expect to find pretty strong spam protection tools on any popular forums. If you contribute to a forum and build up a reputation over time as being relatively impartial and helpful you can build up a number of valuable links – but it’s worth checking to see if nofollow tags are automatically put onto links before you put the hard work in (unless you’re striving for PR/gossip/brand value as much as SEO).
Guys, any suggestions for an alternative to hitwise?
The company wants a cheaper option for competitor analysis, keyword selection and tracking. Used hitwise for sometime, but rather expensive!
Many thanks
Hi Adam,
This post may help you although it’s fairly difficult to get good, accurate stats within the UK without paying a huge amount.
http://www.insiders-view.co.uk/insurance-traffic-trends/0092
A few alternatives you can try are Quantcast, Nielsen NetRatings and Compete.
Hi George
Many thanks for that. I was searching today and found seomoz, looks like an American set up but has many features. Wondered if anybody had any views on them?
Thanks once again!
Hi Adam
seomoz are generally good guys: helpful advice, an active community and a great set of tools. However, their prices are high (for their PRO account). I met up with Rand (the owner) a few weeks ago at their LondonSEO meet – he’s up front about the costs and you know what you’re getting yourself in to.
Having said that, the seomoz tools are a little different to that of hitwise. seomoz are essentially giving you the juicy details of their own search engine (that they’ve built over the last few years). This isn’t quite the same as getting data from ISPs like hitwise, but it’s still useful.
Another alternative is majesticseo who aren’t that focused on the UK market but they have good data.
Feel free to contact us if you want more *personal* thoughts!