4 Unusual (And Long Term) Ways to Promote Your Blog Using Forums

Alex — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:03:59 +0000

Everyone knows that using forum signatures is a good way to generate some backlinks. However, there are other ways to use forums to your advantage.

The ideas I came up with in here are ideas that may take a little longer for you to accomplish than the average forum promotion tactic. While you should always go with regular forum posting, you should try and work your way towards completing these strategies as they have very beneficial results.

Consider Your Reputation

Most forums, especially vBulletin powered forums, have a reputation system. The way to earn a high reputation is to post helpful posts and reply with useful comments. If you’re only focusing on posting for the signature link, then chances are that your reputation will remain low. This is a bad thing considering members are more likely to click on your links if you have a high reputation.

There are plenty of ways to build up a reputation on forums and start getting your blog recognized. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Welcome new members as often as possible.
Post funny/interesting thoughts in general discussions.
Review member submitted websites or projects (where applicable)
Post related links and articles in threads.
Create helpful and interesting new forum threads.
Provide great feedback and suggestions.

Be careful of forums with negative reputation systems. If you make an enemy, your reputation could be held back by them lowering it. Always try to find forums that go without the negative reputation. In addition, never ask for reputation, or complain about being negative repped. This is a sure-fire way to lose respect and authority.

Another aspect of gaining reputation is giving it out. People love being complimented and positively represented, so positive repping other members will make them twice as likely to rep you back. When choosing other members to give reputation to, try and pick members who are interested in your niche, and who seem to be regularly active.

The more reputation you give out, the more those members will notice you. Just remember that there is a limit to how much reputation you can give in an hour, and you don’t want to give it out on a whim. Be genuine with your recommendations!

Specialize in Your Niche’s Forum Category

If you have a blog about football, then join sports forums and become a regular in the football category. If you join a forum about football, then become an expert in the offensive or defensive categories. Always try to become an expert on the board containing your website’s niche. If you want to establish yourself, you can try:

Creating new threads in your niche’s forum.
Answering other members’ questions.
Building and expanding on discussions using your own knowledge.
Asking interesting/well thought out questions.
Finding and sharing related articles and links.

Building up posts in a specific category will help you to establish a name for yourself, and will get you recognized by an audience interested in your blog’s niche. The more you participate in a particular forum, the more you will build up your potential customer base.

Consider Your “Created Threads” Count

Anyone can post on a forum. The members that get noticed are the ones that create new and interesting threads. This shows other members (and the administrators) that you’re willing to go the extra mile in participating in the community. Creating new threads on forums is a great way to increase your reputation and recognition.

Be careful of how useful the threads that you create are. Making threads that are beneficial to the entire community will gain you more authority than threads that pertain only to yourself. Some examples of universally helpful threads are:

A recent announcement from a major website in that forum’s niche.
Free resources that might be useful to members.
An interesting “what if” scenario.

If you run out of ideas for thread creation, look at other forums in your niche. What threads are most popular on those forums? If you find one that hasn’t been posted on the forum you’re active on, then post it yourself. Remember not to create too many threads at one time, lest you be marked as a spammer. It’s also important to maintain the threads you create, replying to other members comments and questions and prompting further discussion.

Creating and maintaining new threads is a fantastic way to get noticed by the community. In addition, those who view your member statistics will be impressed at your thread count, and will probably be interested in visiting your blog.

Become Friends with the Admins

Forum administrators are friendly people, and if you become friends with them, you can gain perks that other members might not have. Even if you’re a little bit shy, there’s no reason not to leave a “what’s up?” or “great job” message on the administrator’s profile. You can also check to see if they have an instant messaging client listed, and attempt to chat with them.

Getting to know the administrator will help you in ways you can’t imagine. Administrators always go to loyal and active members for favors, and perform favors in return. Need a quick stumble or digg? Ask the forum admin and they’ll be happy to trade with you. Need to get a service completed? Ask about members that can help out, and the admin will point you in the right direction.

However, you don’t want to irritate the administrator. If they don’t seem interested in being friends, then move on to a different forum, or focus on other promotional/beneficial tactics. Administrators have sway over the community, and you don’t want to get one angry. Here are some more ideas for becoming friends with the administrator of a forum:

Make small talk – discuss common interests
Offer to help with a small task that needs to be done for the forums
Talk about projects and the status of your endeavors
Ask them how they’re doing from time to time
Be friendly and approachable

Those are the four unusual yet effective ways to advertise your blog on forums. While these methods take more time than your average promotional method, they come with major benefits.

Photo by Toni Verdú Carbó

Signature Advertising 101

Alex — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:00:01 +0000

Signature advertising on forums is one of, if not the best free forms of advertising on the web. All you have to do is type in some anchor text and wrap that text around a URL and start posting on a forum. It is the kind of promotion I do every day I go on the computer, and it has been the most beneficial advertising I have done yet. I bet that most of you reading this now probably found this link on some forum.

How signature advertising works is like this. After every post you make, another user will read your post and then hopefully notice the link. If you made your anchor text descriptive enough, and it interests them then they will most likely click on the link which will bring them to your website. Always remember to make the text descriptive, and don’t make it sound like spam.

Need help getting your link noticed? Sometimes it’s hard to make your link stand out from your post, but if you take some of the following ideas to mind then you should be well on your way to effectively advertise your forum through your signature.

Decorate your link with the forums BBCode

BBCode is like HTML, you can use it to make stuff look pretty. Make your text bold, italic, colored, you can do whatever really. On just about every forum software, the BBCode values are the same. So it’s easy to just copy and paste it from one forum to the other. I would recommend you make your text colored and bold, because in my opinion that is the best way to make it recognizable.

Common BBCode value are:

[B]Makes text bold[/B]
[I]Makes text italic[/I]
[COLOR=RED]Makes text red[/COLOR]

Just a note: The Size BBCode is valuable too, but most forums don’t allow the text to be much bigger than the default value, so you may not be able to use it. But if you can, use it. Just don’t make it obnoxiously big because that’s just, well, obnoxious!

Post plenty of topics

Topics are what start the chain of posts. If you post a hot topic, you will have the first post in the topic. Hot topics get a lot of replies and attention, so when a new poster goes into see what all the buzz is about, they will have to read your post. You don’t even have to post a topic with 1,000 replies, just a few every once in a while. They will all get some kind of attention depending on the size of the forum.

Types of topics that get decent attention

Forum Games (What are you listening to right now, Count to on million, etc.)
Controversial Topics (Like George Bush dodging a shoe)
News, How-To’s and Top 10 posts. They’re a hit on blog posts, and are usually a bigger hit on a forum.

Ask questions

Sometimes you will be making a new topic to ask a question, but not always of course. When you ask a question, EVERYONE wants to answer it. You will probably get tons of answers from so many different people. Take for example DigitalPoint forums. Ask a question, and on average (based on my experience there) you will get about 5-10 people answering it. That’s 5-10 people looking at your post with your link under it. I’m sure you will get quite a few of those people to click your link.

Spread around some advice, get a few clicks in return

If you answer a question, hand out some good advice, or give a good review on something then it turns out you might be a little liked by that user. You want someone to think “Well, they look pretty nice, I think I might visit their site”.

What do you think are the most effective ways of getting your links clicked on a forum? Do you even think signature advertising is effective?

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