How to engage in effective forum marketing to promote your blog.

A countless number of bloggers over the past few years had talked about using forums to market your blog. I almost hate to say this - but it had become an overrated thing to say that “Do forum marketing! It will bring you traffic and backlinks”… But rarely does one talk about actually how to do forum marketing… As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m in a very competitive niche. (We all are - for that matter) So gone are the good old days when you can have one signature link in your forum posts and expect to receive loads of constant traffic when you constantly post on forums.

What effective forum marketing is not…

All the conservative forum promotion methods - well most of them - are ineffective.

Forum marketing is not, going to a forum to promote your last blog post by asking people to visit it and comment on it - or worse, spam the hell out of the forum and get banned. And, it is not about starting random threads to get backlinks for your blog. Just do the math and see.. You start a random thread, will receive a PR0, PR1 in the next Google PR update, 10 guys post on the first page having 3 links each on their signatures. PR1 - 30 outbound links… Is it really worth it?

What effective forum marketing is…

Simply put, finding simple and efficient methods that your competition is not aware of to get more from backlinks and more traffic. (I’m assuming that usually, all forum marketers are behind these two things.. Backlinks and Traffic)

How to do effective forum marketing?

Well, I’m going to let two cats out of the bag now. These have been methods that had done me wonders., and I’d like to share them with you. These are definitely not the only good methods available - there are a zillion. let your creative juices flow - it will show you the way.

1. If you’re after traffic:
   • Get a list some of your good articles. (ex: I’ve got an article about the Wordpress 2.6 release)
   • Find a niche forum that appeals to an audience that will necessarily find the article useful (ex: For a Wordpress 2.6 review article article.. I will choose Bloggeries - which is a forum for bloggers)
   • Search for threads going on about Wordpress 2.6… Simply Google it for - “wordpress 2.6″ site:bloggeries.com - which will return all threads containing wordpress 2.6 in it.
   • Go through those threads, offer something for the ongoing discussion and plug in your article saying - “if you’re interested, maybe you can check out…”
   • Remember to pick 2-3 top results from the Google results since that’s where more SEO juice and more SE traffic is.
2. Are you after backlinks? Well then… When a thread is a tad bit old, for an example, if it’s created before the last Google Page Rank, sometimes, certain threads may get a PR. Unfortunately this is a very time consuming method, but if you’re lucky, you may end up with some goldmines. Simply go through the forum’s most popular category and look for older threads that are abandoned. And have the Google Toolbar installed when you’re browsing and spot the PageRank. If you find a relatively short discussion that hasn’t moved on from the first page (because the threads in the next pages don’t have much PR at all) and if it has a good PR, let’s say PR 3? Leave a reply. So there you will instantly have a PR3 link pointing to your blog.

I’ve experimented these methods and I’m happy with the results. Experiment and see how it goes. If you’ve got any of your methods to share, please do let us know. I’ll reveal many other techniques to get more from Forum marketing as time goes by. So make sure you’re subscribed.