How to build website traffic through forum marketing

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Forum marketing may be the most underutilized website traffic generation strategy. Industry forums are brimming with potential leads and customers. However, to build build traffic to your website and have success, you have to do more than simply creating a signature and leaving generic posts.

Strategies & Techniques for Forum Marketing

1. Find Active Forums in Your Niche

The first step is to find active forums in your niche. This is the best search string you can probably use. You want to go to Google and use your keyword in quotes plus forum. As an example, “website design” + “forum”.

Depending on your specific niche, this search string may or may not work really well. If it doesn’t work and you don’t get a ton of forum results, you can use another search string on Google – your keyword plus Powered by vBulletin. vBulletin is forum software that is used for creating and managing forums.

If that doesn’t get you the forum results you’re looking for, you can also try this search string on Google – your keyword plus “hot thread with new post”.

These are three really reliable search strings and you can usually find plenty of forums in your niche, but if these aren’t yielding enough results or you just want more, there’s yet another trick to find more forums. What you want to do is use a niche specific keyword.

Once you’ve found a forum, you want to see if it’s even worth your time. The first thing you want to do is look at the latest post info and look at when the last post was posted. Basically, what you’re doing is seeing how often people are posting on this site and how active it is, because there is no way to see how many active users there are, so this is a proxy way to do that. Under posted you want to look at the date and in that case that is yesterday, so that’s pretty recent. This is also from yesterday, which is pretty recent. As long as you see that, it’s probably worth making an account.

2. Register For A Particular Forum

Your next step is to register. Find wherever it says register, click that button. Then, you want to fill out the user name or screen name. You want to make it your brand name or your personal name. You want to use something very memorable and branded. Ideally, you would put your brand name or your site name as your username. That’s important because people are going to be seeing that and associating your content on the forum with your brand. If this is something that’s not your brand, it’s going to be harder for them to associate the content with the name of your business or the name of your website.

Once you have an account and it’s all set up, your next step is to create a signature. A forum signature is important because that’s actually how you’re going to drive traffic to your site. In your signature, you just want to create some call to action, a benefit driven call to action.

You don’t want to make the mistake that a lot of people make with forum marketing, which is to try to get some SEO value from this link and they put exact match anchor text. That is not smart because really Google doesn’t consider these links particularly valuable and that over-optimized anchor text can hurt you down the road. Just make sure to use some sort of call to action in your anchor text that isn’t just your keyword because this is actually how you’re going to drive traffic to your site from the forum.

3. Participating In The Forum

Once you have your account set up and your signature ready to go, your next step is to actually participate in the forum. To do that, you want to visit the main area of the forum and see where most people hang out.

The next thing you’ll want to do is click on one of the areas that either has a lot of people viewing or is an area of expertise or both and click on it. You want to click at the thread titles and see where you can add value.  That’s really important because a lot of people, when they do forum marketing, they make the mistake of just responding to as many as possible. In my experience, it’s definitely quality over quantity. If you can maybe add one to two quality posts to a thread per day, you can get quite a bit of traffic from that.

You definitely want to be early on and that’s why when you look at the forum section, you want to stick to the top as much as possible and not scroll down too much because then when you participate you’re going to be towards the bottom of the thread and not as many people are going to see you. You should include the keyword in the forum post and also in the title.

4. Creating Your Own Thread

If you want to get the most traffic possible from forum marketing, you have to create your own thread. Participating in threads is great, but you also want to create your own threads. You can actually just copy and paste content from your site. It doesn’t have to be original for a forum. Make sure it’s indexed on your site and once Google indexes it, you can head over to your forum of choice and then give them, maybe, a different version that’s a little shorter or more brief or maybe add something to it that’s exclusive for the forum, so it’s not really just copying and pasting.

That’s really all there is to building website traffic through forum marketing. You want to create an account that has your brand name as the user name. You want to participate as often as possible, but make sure you’re providing value every single time you participate in a thread. Then, when you publish something great on your site, wait for it to get indexed and then head to the form and then paste it there and maybe make some modifications and that’s going to get you some really, really great traffic.

Get Free Publicity for Your Website Using HARO

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Wouldn’t it be spectacular to get free publicity for your website with a link and a quote on a major news publication like the Washington Post or Huffington Post? It’s actually easier than you might think and it involves using a website called “HARO” or “Help A Reporter Out” – www.helpareporter.com. HARO is a service that connects journalists in need of sources and marketers hungry for publicity.

Get Free Publicity for Your Website

HARO is a great way for small businesses to get free publicity. All you need to do is sign up and choose between the free or paid plans. The free plan subscribes you to 3 emails a day that you have to comb through and respond to. The paid plans allow you to go on the HARO website and search and filter to the specific category that you might respond to with a pitch. The paid plan also gives you a profile on the HARO site.

Whenever there is something that is relevant to your business in HARO, you can respond with a pitch. Many small businesses have been featured in local newspapers, on blogs, and in several online news magazines. If you’re lucky, you can build up a relationship with a specific journalist. 

How To Boost Exposure For Your Website Without SEO

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There are many ways to boost exposure for your website. SEO or search engine optimization is one method, but for some online businesses – particularly ecommerce businesses – there’s too much competition for first page search results. This post discusses four proven methods for driving referral traffic to your website and building brand exposure even if your site doesn’t appear on the first page of Google search results.

Four Methods for Increasing Website Exposure & Referral Traffic

1) Build an email list from your existing website visitors

This is something of a no-brainer. Every website should have an email signup. If you don’t, please contact Connect4 today (202-236-2968) so we can help you set it up. However, this method is slightly different because it offers a purchase incentive to visitors. This can be a coupon that the visitor can use immediately on the site to buy something. For example, REI.com offers people 15% off select products if they sign up for the email list.

2) Incorporate products into your blog

Another way to build exposure and referral traffic is to create a blog with great content that features some of the products that you sell or services that you provide. Zappos is a company that excels at this approach. If you go to Zappos, it looks like any other ecommerce site that sells clothes and shoes. However, if you go to the Zappos blog, they do a great job of incorporating their products into great content. They also give how-to tips. If your blog isn’t getting much traction, you might want to shift away from product announcements and try a Zappos-type approach and integrate your products or services into great content.

3) Create expert advice videos

Another way to get exposure for your website without SEO is to create content that appeals to your target audience but doesn’t even talk about the products or services that you offer. Once again REI does this really well with their YouTube channel. They’ve identified their target market and then created expert advice videos. They are assuming that people will watch the expert advice videos and then be reminded about a purchase they intended to make and be reminded that REI is a place to go to make such a purchase.

4) Guest posting

Yet another way to boost exposure for your website without SEO is to guest post on someone else’s blog. What you’d first want to do is to do just what REI did and identify your target audience. If I were doing this, I would search Google for something like “small business technology” + “guest post”, and then I would go through the various sites and pick the site with the most comments.

As you can see, the key to promoting your website without SEO revolves around creating great content. You want great content that appeals to your target customer and a variety of vehicles for getting that content in front of them.

Collaborative Online Writing Tools

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Smashing Magazine has a particularly good post on collaborative online writing tools. They review the following tools:

  • Penflip
  • Poetica
  • Draft
  • Typewrite
  • Onword

Read the entire article at Smashing Magazine.

Best Practices for Title Tags

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This post goes far beyond standard search engine optimization practice. If you haven’t read our post on standard search engine optimization, you should read that first and then come back to this.

Best Practices for Title Tags

Here are the basic best practices for title tags:

  • Generally 55 to 60 characters in width
  • Place keywords as close to the beginning as possible; the closer a word to the start of the tag, the more influence it exerts
  • Make title tags readable
  • If you include a brand in the title tags, place it at the end unless it is a well-known brand people seek out
  • Make each title unique
  • Avoid stuffing keywords
  • The title should form a complete coherent thought before Google cuts it off at the 60 character mark. Title tags that communicate a clear, coherent thought earn a higher click-through rate.

 

 

SEO – Basic Strategies for Top Ranking Search Results

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Everyone wants to know how to rank as high as possible on Google. That’s the definition of SEO for most people. What it comes down to is fairly straightforward – content, links to your content, and an organized structure of your content. All Google is doing is trying to connect questions with answers. If your site provides answers to questions (all sites do), then it’s important to know what those questions are, and how Google wants you to answer those questions.

SEO – What Is the Ultimate Goal?

Websites that are rewarded with top ranking search results, are those that deliver a consistent and customer-centric user experience. Everything about the site must be for the benefit of the customer, and that goal must be obvious to Google.

How Can This Be Achieved?

The following are some key strategies that will improve seo and help websites receive top ranks in search results:

  • Post Natural Content

Content should read almost conversationally; it shouldn’t sound awkward or forced in order to squeeze in specific keywords.

  • Use Page URLs Like Website Signage

Page urls should read normally and give visitors a clear indication of what the page is about. Get rid of special characters and gobblety-gook.

  • Use Accurate Title Tags to Keep Visitors On Your Website

Title tags and meta descriptions should accurately reflect the page content. For locally-focused companies, heavy emphasis on geographical reference will aid in the search results.

  • Create Intuitive Site Architecture

Site architecture should be clear and intuitive for visitors. Users should never have to wonder how to find information or get somewhere on your website.

  • Full Support for Mobile Devices is a Must

Full support for mobile devices is mandatory. With the expected number of mobile online users surpassing desktop users this year, this market will only continue to grow. If your site doesn’t capture this audience, you’re likely to see a big dip in traffic if you haven’t yet already.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cat and mouse game. As Google makes changes to and refines its search algorithm, the websites and businesses that adapt to those changes are the ones that will be rewarded with higher search results.

25 Useful Tools For Competitive Research

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Let’s face it. You can learn a ton from your competitors. Whether you’re a restaurant and want to know about changing food trends or an interior designer trying to tap into a new geographic market, there are tons of different factors to consider and a broad variety of marketing tools. Many tools that help you monitor your own web performance can also help you gather data on competition. So it’s possible that you’re already using some of these tools without using the features that help you evaluate your competitors.

Top 25 Most Useful Tools For Competitive Market Research

To view the complete list, visit the Kissmetric blog.