Traffic Strategy #6: Marketing via Forums
One of the easiest ways of generating traffic to your website while building backlinks campaigns that will send unlimited traffic and boost your search engine ranking is through forum marketing.
Not only will you be able to claim your share of traffic but forums provide you with the opportunity to quickly build brand awareness, so that you are recognized as an authority in your market.
You will need to spend time providing quality information to the community, as well as helping members by addressing questions, offering guidance, and doing your best to contribute to the network, but it’s one of the easiest ways to jumpstart your website, absolutely free.
Allocate 1 hour a day to marketing your business via community forums, but make sure to promote INDIRECTLY! You want your website to be seen within your forum’s signature box, rather than in spamming your link within discussion threads or posts, otherwise you’ll lose your account and likely end up banned from the community.
You also want to focus only on active, established forums, keeping in mind that your posts will be quickly indexed, sending additional traffic to your website from the search engines directly.
Make sure to optimize your forum profile as well! This is a great way to generate authority backlinks to your website, so include information about you, and a direct link to your website!
Finding Niche Based Forums:
You can locate relevant forums by visiting http://www.Big-Boards.com and searching for available community boards by entering in keywords relating to your market or by browsing through available categories.
Using Search Engines To Locate Forums:
When you’ve compiled a decent list of forums, you’ll put that list aside temporarily and then start using the search engines to find more. When using the search engines like www.Google.com , you want to search for two particular types of phrases:
Put some of the more popular keywords for your particular niche inside the quotes and remember to search with quotes since you want an exact match for your search.
You don’t have to get too extensive since you want the easiest to find forums instead of those that have used SEO extensively to get themselves listed higher in the rankings.
When you’re satisfied with your preliminary list of forums that you want to try, go to Alexa.com and do a search for each. You’ll be able to get their current traffic statistics as well as their rank on the web.
If the site was listed as a popular site on big-boards.com and is still popular on Alexa.com, then it’s probably a forum you should put at the top of your list.
Additional Resource:
Complete Forum Directory (with alexa ranking, etc):
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/best-webmaster-forums