How To Use Forums For Viral Marketing
Participating in forums can be an excellent way to spread the word about your web site and attract traffic, ebook or other product. If you go about forum participation in the right way you can not only gain viral exposure for you web site or ebook but there are also potential other benefits such as the possibility of striking up relationships with other forum members for mutual benefit. This does not mean that the second you have built a new web site or written a new viral ebook that you should immediately hit each and every forum you possibly can and ask all and sundry to come look at your new site or tell them how great your new ebook is. This will certainly be an unproductive approach. Think of forums as little cities – some of them are actually more like a large metropolis – and if you are the new kid on the block you have to lean the ropes before you go putting your weight about, figuratively speaking of course!
If you your web site or ebook is about gardening then there would be little point joining a forum about rock music. How may heavy metal fans are avid gardeners? Probably not that many. So the first thing to do is seek out forums which directly relate to your particular web site, ebook or other product. Looking for forums is easy – just go to your search engine of choice and knock yourself out.
Trawl through the search results and find the biggest forums you can related to your niche. See how many members there are, how busy the forum is, how relative is it to what you have to offer. If you did join and participate try to take a view on if the current forum members would be interested. Is it a place you think you could usefully contribute to.
Importantly, look at current posts in the forum to make sure signatures are allowed. If they are – great! That’s what you want because your signature goes in each post you make and that in itself is a little signpost to your web site. Anyone reading a forum post you make with your signature appended to it is a potential visitor to your web site.
Once you have done your research it is time to take the plunge and join the forum. Every forum has rules – read them, become familiar with them and be sure to abide by them. Seek out some current threads (forum speak for conversations) and contribute yourself if you feel you can add value to what’s going on. Other forum members will read your post and even reply to it and if your posts are intelligent and add value then you will build up a good reputation amongst your fellow forum members as a knowledgeable contributor. And because your posts will include your signature you have reasonable chance that readers will be curious enough to click on it and visit your web site, read your ebook or contact you through the forum private messaging functionality.
The key is to create a forum signature which people will click on. There are different trains of thought on this however my suggestion would be to keep it short and snappy whilst at the same time relevant. For example if your web site or ebook is about lawn care you might make your forum signature something like ‘want to know how to grow the perfect lawn’ and link it back to your web site.
The more relevant forums you contribute to, the greater your chances of a flood of free traffic. And not only that, at the same time you are constantly building back links to your site each one of which can bring you traffic at any time. Viral forum marketing is a powerful but often overlooked weapon for web site promotion purposes. Why not add it to your arsenal today?
About the AuthorDownload your free page rank ebook and see how I have gained and maintained number 1 search engine positions regardless of google page rank. Visit http://www.pagerankparanoia.com today for your free ebook.
Filed Under: Marketing
