Forums: A Nice Way To Promote Yourself & It’s Free

Find a Online Forum or Two Where You Can Sincerely Become Involved

Though it might seem to be a very obvious way to promote your budding online business, sometimes things like this just don’t register with a new internet marketer. I found this to be the case with one of my clients recently.

He is all excited that he’s finally got a really nice, SEO’d website up and running. Some of his targeted keyword phrases have even shot right up into the top-ten Google rankings, so both he and I were very pleased.

But then I received an email asking “so when do I expect people to start placing orders?” It was a bit hard for me to not laugh too hard when I read this. I think most of you reading this post know that you have to work at promoting your website, right? We can’t just sit back and wait for the stampede of customers to overtake our site just because we have great organic search engine rankings!

I love my new-to-online-marketing clients! Bless their hearts. Really. They keep me attuned to the fact that much of what I have learned over the years is not as commonplace knowledge as I may think. And their questions (such as the “where’s the customers?”) remind me I need to go over the most basic of traffic generation how-tos when their new website is uploaded and turned over to them.

One Easy Way to Help Drive Traffic to Your Site is Via Forum Participation

It’s important to promote your website in every way possible. Another popular way you’ll see this being referred to is driving traffic to your site. A free, simple and basically pretty easy way to do this, is to find a forum (or two or three) that:

• is in a niche that attracts people who would be interested in the services or products you are promoting on your site;
• is a forum where you believe you can truly get involved in answering peoples questions, and really provide good informational answers – don’t post for posting’s sake and say things like “I think that is true, too” or “I agree” – always provide helpful answers; and
• allows you to place a sig (signature) line on each post you make and allows COMMERCIAL oriented links to be included in the sig line. Warning: Not all forums allow a commercial link or even a mention of anything remotely close to “please visit my site for more information” with a simple mention of the site to visit. You’ll get booted off and banned if you disregard a forum’s rules.

This non-commercial posting rule is a situation I come up against more often than not when I wish to promote a website I have that is in a hobbyist niche. It seems that the best forums I could post in do not allow any commercial advertising nor mentions of one’s website. Again … make sure to read the terms and conditions about posting before you even bother to register an account.

And as I said, make sure that if you are utilizing forums as a free advertising vehicle, do make sure to become a valuable member of the forum community. Now this doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to be answering peoples questions (or even asking a few of your own – doesn’t hurt to ask questions and this does allow for a conversation to get stated, of course) a number of times each day, unless you want to … but dropping by a few times a week to see if there is the opportunity for you to answer a question, or add a nice comment is the way to best go about this marketing method.

There are so many free ways we can promote our online business, and taking advantage of using forums to get our name out in front of a large community of possible prospects is one great way.

So, back to my client’s question … my reply to him was “Ahhh, now you are going to learn about the concept of “driving traffic to your site”. Listen up and I’ll teach you …”