Posts Tagged ‘Participation’

Project Traffic! for Your Niche Site – Leveraging on Forum Participation & Branding

Monday, January 25th, 2010

In this next section of Project Traffic! (not an affiliate program) we shall discuss the â??How Toâ? with individual focus of some of the tactics in detail.

Forum Participation & Marketing is In Focus at Project Traffic!

Online Forums are excellent places to interact and Forum participation. If done right, your participation becomes a natural marketing tool and can be very effectual branding as well.

The Benefits of Forums Participation are essentially the following:

A Platform for Viral Marketing. The power of the Word of mouth of forum is both lateral and simultaneous when leveraged using the forum approach. This takes the form of viral marketing which very quickly and effectively spreads the word for you and your product offerings.

That is, if you are excellent, or for that topic, terrible, you will be distinction or notorious in no time at all! And of course, the excellent or the terrible you have done would be circulating virally within as well as outside of the forum. Afterall, cyberspace sees no boundaries. Thinking positive, try imagining the amount of traffic you drive to your site.

Check Demand with Test Marketing. So you have a fantastic thought, product or service. But you are not sure whether they will sell. Tactfully bring up the topic of your offerings at your niche forum and trigger discussion. Let others give their opinion.

This platform serves as a quick test and you are then able to get an overall perspective of how well your thought or product is accepted, assuming of course that the forumers are expressive of your intended niche segments.

To enhance this process and your statistics, search out a minimum of 10 niche committed forums and float your product thoughts. You might even get improvement suggestions that catapult your sales.

Connect, Network and Build Industry Relationships Be in the know, be seen, be heard, be felt! Essentially, you need to be seen as being on your toes when you network with other forumers within the industry. This is all about branding and positioning yourself in the forums as an authority or expert in a certain area.

In fact, if done correctly, branding you or your product offerings could even take you offline from your online activities and help you connect and grow with real industry experts. It takes some effort as in all relationship building activities, but this does have long term benefits for your business and cannot be ignored.

Make Direct Sales Opportunities. Note that the operative word here is â??Make … Opportunitiesâ?. Never should you frankly sell your harvest at the forums and this is a taboo in most forums. Have respect for the forum master, your fellow forumers who are there to interact.

If you wish to sell, make a subtle link at your signature or sign off. Sales is a by-product of your forum participation activities which should Not be your priority. Referrals, Self-Branding, future long term traffic flow are your key objectives. Stay tuned for the next session at Project Traffic!

Project Traffic! for Your Niche Site – Relationship & Viral Marketing With Forum Participation

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Part 2 of Traffic Project! (not an affiliate program) is a prolongation of Part 1 to leverage on Forum Participation to generate long term traffic to your site.

How To Search For Relevant Forums.

Do a Google search for your related niche forums to best leverage your expertise. To find your niche forums, key in the following line into your google search box and press penetrate. â??allintitle: dog training filetype:html forumâ?

How To Exude Forum Etiquette & Win Hearts.

Never use vulgarity and foul language in Forums. Never be intrusive or offensive with words. Respect your fellow forumers as you are all there to learn and share. This is especially right when you are new in any particular forum.

Give High feature advice at your niche forums. Try to make memorable impressions and spot your persona as an industry expert, adopting an advisor or mentor role.

Build and enhance your credibility with committed interaction and unreservedly provide advice, both online and offline, within forum and without. People appreciate people who wholeheartedly help them resolve their problems. When people what you do for them, they will start to stay your site, wanting to know more about your work. This will have potential to turn viral. So keep building those relationships but be real!

How to Maintain Discipline.

Forum participation is a long term process, as in all relationship building activities. To ensure continued effect, set target for forum participation on a per day basis. Make Time for it and schedule a fixed timing daily for it. Do not participate only when you have the time to spare as this will produce procrastination. Be committed in one or two niche forums which you reckon you could penetrate and establish a branding and expert spot. Never target too broadly or too many forums, that can spread yourself too thin.

Post A New and Feature Anchor Article In The Forum.

One fantastic tip I have to share with you is posting a feature Anchor article in your niche forum you are most committed, instead of going for posting it on your own blog? In fact, tactically, high trafficked niche forums is one place which you could sufficiently impress your target niche groups with your expertise. Remember, permanently post feature comments in your niche forum rather than go for quantity.

Use a Simple Sign off.

There is no need to use fanciful, complicated or cluttered sign offs as they could backfire on your positioning. Most importantly, avoid breaking forum rules like including affiliate links. Most terrible still, never spam the forums, as this is a sure-kill for any unscrupulous former. Stay tuned and check out the more of Project Traffic! series at my site.

Backlinks From Forum Participation

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Ranking highly in the search engine results is very vital in generating high traffic to your website/blog. In addition to having excellent, relevant content on your site one of the best ways to increase your search ranking is to get high feature backlinks to your site. A backlink is simply a clickable link that directs to a further website (yours). The most powerful backlinks are one-way backlinks. One way backlinks are best; these are when a site links to your site but you don‘t reciprocally link back to them. Putting backlinks in forums is a fantastic way to go about doing this. These links can generate direct traffic to your site, as people browsing the forum click your links in addition to raising your search engine ranking. You need to be careful when using forums in this way. Do it incorrect and you will be branded a spammer and most likely get your forum account closed. If done properly but, it can be a powerful and easily used tools to add to your repertoire.Locate Forums Relating To Your Niche: “Relating to your niche“ is the key term!. You want to be sure to find forums related to your niche – the topic of your website. Probably the simplest way to do this is to type in your niche into Google with the word “forum” after it. Let’s say you have a blog on healthy living. You’d type into Google “Healthy Living Forum”, or a touch similar.There are two basic reasons why you want to find forums that really relate to your niche.. First, the search engines will usually give more weight to links pointing to your site if they come from sites centred around the same niche as your site. Secondly, you are far more likely to come across parties that are interested in your site by placing it in the appropriate forums. Join The Best Forums:After finding the forums you want, you need to  choose on which ones you should join. Click the links to stay about half a dozen of the top search results. You can usually browse through forums without having to sign up, only when you really want to participate, do you need to join. If you land on a forum that won’t let you view unless you join, forget it and go on. Its only really worth your while to join standard forums so take a look at how many members there are in each forum you stay. You also need to make sure those members are committed. Go into one of the more standard forums categories and scan down the list of threads to see when the last posting was made. This information is usually in the right hand column of the forum threads table. If you see a lot of posts made in the last 24 hours, you’ve found a forum with lots of committed members. A standard forum like this will attract the search engines and therefore your links will be picked up reasonably quickly. Search engines tend to like sites with lots of frequently updated, relevant content. This is the ultimate type of forum.The last vital step previous to unification a forum is to make sure that it allows you to add a “signature” to all of your posts. Jump into one of the more standard threads on the forum. Scroll down and look at the posts to see if anyone has a signature showing at the bottom of their post. There will usually be a horizontal line after the body of the post and some text and/or links underneath it. Evenly people just have a quote or witty saying, but sometimes they will have links as well. Not everyone will have a signature, but try to find some members who do. Signatures are crucial, because this is where you are going to place the links to your site. When you find a forum that fit’s the bill, follow the steps to sign up. You only need to find a few to start with, you can permanently find more later on  Your Signature:Log in to the forum. Once there go to your profile. Evenly this will be called ‘User CP’ or ‘User Profile’. In this area you can edit things like your avatar, your bio and preferences. Look for the part that says a touch like ‘Edit signature’ and click that. You’ll see a text field where you can type in the text you want to appear beneath all your posts. This is where you’ll place the backlinks to your site. Forums use a special kind of code to allow members to format their posts. It’s called BBCode and it’s reasonably simple to use once you get the hang of it. Copy the examples not more than and exchange the URL and text to your URL and some memorable keyword-rich text. Paste the code into you signature box and save it. Link to your website or blog with this code: Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the simple way. You can see in the code above where you need to edit the domain to be your domain. In this example, ‘Coin Collecting’ will be the anchor text for the link. This is where you want to place your keywords. Nearly all forums will allow you to have a link in your signature. If you want to make your signature bold, just add the bold tags around it like this: [b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the simple way.[/b] Most forums will allow you to bold the text in your signature. If you add the bold code and your signature still doesn’t come out in bold then it’s you know the bold formatting is not allowed. Some forums will also allow you to exchange the color of the text, even if the anchor text will come out as the default link color, usually blue. Here’s how you exchange the text color: [color=red]Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the simple way.[/color] You can also combine formatting. This would make your signature red and bold (apart from for the link text which will usually be blue bold). [color=red][b]Learn how to start [url=http://onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the simple way.[/b][/color] One final tip for making your signature. Less is more. If you make your signature look spamming people will treat you like a spammer. You don’t have to use up all available lines in your signature. Make it fleeting, sweet and to the point. If you post fantastic content and people are interested they will click your link. Step 4: Participate! The first three steps were all preparation. Now you get to start making backlinks to your site! It’s simple, just participate in the forum. Post excellent content, question questions. Try to help people out by answering questions. Be nice, be helpful. Every post you make will give you a backlink to your site. The higher the feature of your post, the more powerful your backlink will be, at least in Google. Because Google looks at the text surrounding a link to determine the relevancy of a link having excellent content in your posts is much more valuable than having a post that says a touch like, “fantastic post, I agree”. If you simply participate in the forum and try to be friendly and helpful chances are your content will take care of itself. That’s it. Have fun. And remember, you can exchange your signature any time you want. You might exchange the text a bit from time to time to find out what generates the most clicks to your site. Use This Method To Build A Powerful Residual Income With A Legitimate Online Business