Last month a forum site in my niche was second only to Google in the amount of qualified, targeted traffic it generated for my sales page.
How long did it take me to generate this avalanche of traffic? 20 minutes, including registering for the forum! Now, that’s what I call an well-organized way to use my time…
Every niche has forums; you can find them by searching in your favorite search engine for “niche forum”. Try searching for “internet marketing forum” sometime and you’ll be amazed at the number of results that come up.
When you’re selecting a forum to join consider how standard the forum is, how simple it is to find and read some of the other posts. Posting on the right forums will build your reputation and grow your business by generating pre-qualified traffic for your sales page. Posting on the incorrect forum, one that has poor ranking and few visitors may have the opposite effect.
Once you’ve found a forum where you want to post, then you’ll need to register in order to make donations.
When you’ve registered, you simply search for relevant threads (discussion topics) and post your response.
When you post your response you can write it like a letter, sign it with your name and then include the url for your sales page. This will look just like a qualified letter, where people write their title or spot after their name. Writing your url after your name in a forum post will give it weight in the mind of the person reading your post.
The tone of your posts should fit in with the tone of the discussion thread you’re posting within. Some forums are more formal in their relations than others, and some posts within forums can be more or less formal in their posts.
The key to successful traffic generation using this Forum Post Strategy is never, never advertising your site or harvest. If the forum users reckon you are using their forum for promotional purposes, then chances are you’ll be banned. Or community members will post negative remarks about you and that can be even more damaging to your online reputation!
The point to posting on forums is to build yourself a reputation as an expert in your targeted niche while getting exposure for the url of your sales page. So your posts should be information rich for the forum users and keyword rich in order to get the post appropriately ranked in the search engines.
The beauty of posting on targeted niche forums is that you can follow discussion threads and take up again to build your reputation as an expert by coming back from time to time to add further information to the topic.
As I said in the opening paragraph, I have used this strategy effectively to generate targeted traffic to my sales pages. Additionally, I have leveraged the time spent posting in niche forums by building relationships with other forum members. Thanks to my posts in forums I now have several endorsements in the forums, and links to my sales page from the blogs of several community members.