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Offer To Buy An Ad

In addition to the free links you’ll be getting from posting on the forum, the owner of the forum will probably have some ad space available. A lot of webmasters stay away from buying these ads because they think it will be too expensive. That’s sometimes not the case at all.

When you contact the forum owner you should ask what is available as well as the cost. If you do find that the costs are too high you can always negotiate. Even if it’s not clear whether the owner has any ad space, you can always offer to buy some because it might be something they haven’t considered before.

If it’s a very large forum that doesn’t seem to be privately owned, there is still a way for you to get your ads on their site. This is actually a method that may be even cheaper than dealing with the forum owner directly. You can actually go into your Adwords account and target certain websites.

That means you can find a forum you really like (that already has Adsense on their site) and bid on ads that will appear there. This is a way to target people you know are going to be ideal prospects for your site – sometimes for dirt cheap prices.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Create an Effective Profile

You should always create a profile to go along with your forum username. As you post more and become more known people are going to be interested in reading your profile. You’ll want to have some meaningful content written there that describes what your website is about, as well as a link to your website. You might be surprised at how many people will end up visiting your site through your profile.

People are naturally curious about others who share great information. That’s why you’ll get visitors to your profile and why it’s a good idea to have it ready.

Once again, you can’t forget the fact that you can include your website in your profile. These profiles often get indexed by the search engines so you’ll be getting yet another back link to your website.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Choose the Right Anchor Text

Since you’re going to have your link in your signature file as you make posts in the forum, you’re going to want to make sure it contains the right anchor text. As you learned earlier, having anchor text that reflects your targeted keywords is a great way to boost your site’s rankings for that keyword in the search engines.

For example, if I wanted to rank for the keyword “cat food” in Google I would make sure that my forum signature file had “cat food” as the anchor.

Keep in mind that you’re not just getting one backlink for all the posts you’ll make. You’re actually going to get a backlink each time you post. This can have a massive effect on your search engine rankings, which is another reason to become active and involved in a highly ranked forum.

You should also know that if there are too many backlinks coming in with the same anchor text it raises a red flag for Google. Their algorithms can figure out when people are trying to game the search engines so they guard against this.

That’s why you might want to join a few good forums, so that you can have a different anchor text for each signature file you have.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Become known before displaying your link

The worst thing you can do is join a forum and immediately start throwing your link around. That’s actually the best way to get banned faster than you can imagine. It is a much better tactic to start posting and adding valuable input to questions and generally getting to know the other members first.

After you’ve “paid your dues”, you can start to put your website in your signature file and show that you’ve got a great website to offer. Remember, you want to entice people to visit your site, so make sure your text in your signature file is interesting enough for people to click on.

By waiting before you show your link you’ll build trust. This is what will get people to visit you and to listen to what you have to say as an expert in your niche.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Find the right forums

The very first step in proper forum marketing is finding the right forum to join in the first place. You may already know of some good ones, but if you haven’t found some it’s very easy to do. Simply type “your niche forum” into Google or another search engine. The results that appear should point you to some great options.

Examples:

“gardening forum”
“skin care message board”
“pet community”

Now, it should be said that not all of the forums that appear in the results are going to be worthwhile. Some of them are pretty dead and don’t get a lot of traffic. You want to find a very active forum with many members and many new posts every day in order to have the best results.

You should also read the forum rules and start browsing some posts to get a feel for things before you join and spend a lot of time. You are, of course, going to want to be able to put your website in your signature file and have a certain amount of freedom in your posts. That doesn’t mean you are planning to spam the forum, but you’re not going to get any visitors to your site if you are unable to display your link.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is another excellent way to get more traffic. Forums, or message boards, are targeted communities where members join in order to have discussions with each other about the topic at hand.

For example, since you’re interested in Internet marketing and finding ways to drive traffic to your website the chances are good that you are a member of an Internet marketing forum or two or three. The same goes for people who are interested in dog training, gardening, skin care, and nearly every niche out there.

In fact, here are two that I recommend:

www.warriorforum.com – Where all the “big dogs” hang out. A great place to learn and get special deals.

http://www.123webmarketing.com/forumtraffic.html – This forum allows you to earn free advertising credits for every post that you read and/or respond to.

By joining forums and interacting in the right way, you can definitely drive traffic to your sites.

Tags: Forum Marketing