Marketing your website and brand in forums is another piece of the puzzle and one of my favorite ways to pass the time. This forum marketing strategy is comprised of all of the steps which I regularly take to benefit my site by way of forums and forum posting.
- Sign up for forums which are relevant to your site. This should be a no brainer. You’re wasting your time posting in an irrelevant forum if you’re looking to promote your site and if you try to sell here, people will really rip you a new one. Any links you get from this site won’t be worth all that much either, so focus on relevant forums/links.
- Take some time choosing a good username, avatar, and filling out your profile in full. There’s nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot and neglecting this as soon as you sign up for a new message board. Your name is especially important because this isn’t something you can change, you’re stuck with it from the beginning, so go with something which reflects yourself or your site. You can also use your real name as people like honesty even in this form.
- By the same token, use your own picture as your avatar so people can better connect with YOU. Also, don’t neglect your profile when you sign up. This doesn’t mean just putting in your URLs for the link juice, but sharing a bit about yourself. When someone checks out your profile, the more you write the more it looks like you’re an established member of that site who “cares”.
- Another overlooked forum marketing strategy is to actually create your own threads as opposed to commenting on others. You can make an interesting insight or observation about something in that field which can garner you lots of thanks and significantly increase your exposure on that forum in just that one post.
- Most people’s forum strategy consists of posting just enough to meet the site’s requirements to be able to list their links in their signature for the juice. While you should include these links to your site as soon as you can, make sure you regularly engage in discussions for that site so you don’t look like a freeloader.
- Another good forum marketing strategy is to create links back to your content on your site when you see someone asking a question which your site can answer. You should wait until you’re an established member of a site before you start including links back to your content, however. Just like links in your signature, many sites have post requirements which you have to meet before you can put links in your posts, as well. I’ll generally wait until I have about 100 posts or more on a forum before I’ll start to do this. Even if the moderators will allow it earlier than that, if you haven’t established yourself on that site, other members who don’t yet know you will take issue with it.
- This is less a forum strategy but more a generalized tip for creating content. While you’re browsing forums relevant to your niche, you can look for questions people are asking and use them as ideas for possible topics you can write about on your own site. You can even use this in conjunction with the last point, writing a post based on a question, then pointing that thread towards your site.