Increasing Traffic with Forums
Forums are all over the Internet with a niche focus on nearly anything you can imagine. Internet marketing and making money at home are among the most popular forum niches today, and could be for some time to come.
To find a forum focused on your niche, all you need to do is search for your niche keywords and add the word forum. You’ll find a list of options in the results, but you will want to be careful about joining too many. Part of the value of forum traffic comes from your participation, so you’ll want to choose one or two to join. If you see any that charge a premium, you can consider those, too, but free forums can give you the same, if not better, results.
Why? Members will have the same problems, needs, and questions, regardless of whether or not they are paying members. Those members also have buying power for products they find useful or resources they need.
Traffic generate using forum
When you first join a new forum, you will want to look for the “new member” category or thread, where you can introduce yourself and do a soft self-promotion of the product or service you are offering. Tell about who you are, where you live, what you do, and your interest and experience in the niche you just joined.
A good idea is to create a short friendly bio you can use to post in each forum introduction thread when you join a new one. The next thing you should do is fill out your profile and create a signature, also known as a sig. Your signature will appear at the bottom of every single forum post, along with any private messages you send. All you need is your screen name or your real name, your link, and a simple statement to generate clicks.
Here are a couple of examples:
“Robert Smith: Need a website? Contact RS Web Design to get a new website for your business!”
“Robin Patterson: Housebreaking your puppy driving you crazy? Visit Potty Training Puppy for easy solutions to get puppy going outside in no time.” (These links aren’t real. Don’t try to click them, they are just for indicative purpose.)
Whatever you decide your niche is, add your linked signature to every single posting or email you send, even emails to your mother. A carefully constructed signature is totally viral and will zip around the Web without you having to think about it again.
Add your linked signature to everything—even emails you send to your mother. A well-written signature can go viral around the Internet without you giving it a second thought.
For instance, let’s say you email your mom a recipe, and she shares it with her friends. Your email signature is going with that recipe, and those friends could share it with their friends and so on. Somewhere down the line, as that recipe email keeps circulating, you’re bound to get some traffic because someone is curious, or could really use your products or services. With your online personality out of the way, it’s time to take care of the rest of your forum marketing tactics.
Read all the categories in the forum. Get to know the moderators and how they comment. Find out who the strongest members are and what they post in terms of questions and answers. Once you have a good feel for the community, jump in and start offering your own questions and answers. Provide links to free resources.
As you continue to provide support and build a reputation for being a reliable source of information, you will become a valued community member. You are building a reputation and creating credibility so people will listen to you when it is time for you to make a sales pitch.
Many marketing forums will have an Announcement thread, where you can deliberately market your products. Before you post there, make sure you read how it is done on that forum, and make sure you are abiding by forum rules. Use the methods with your own promotional method.
If you really want to get attention to your products, offer the forum members something for free—something like a small report, software, an eBook or a set of articles—that they can use for their own purposes. Be on standby so you can answer questions, and make sure you use the product before you give it away. Don’t forget when you have a product launch, a couple of hours posting on the forums can greatly add to your sales by just including your sig link in each post.
When you have a product launch, spending a couple of hours posting on the forums you’re actively involved in with the link in your signature can boost your sales quite a bit.
Give it a try, and you’ll like it. You’ll definitely get a response and see a traffic increase—and it’s completely free!
Free Traffic Generation Using SEO
Making sure your website is popular with your customers and the search engines is no easy feat. It takes more than submitting your website to the searching engines (the bots will automatically find it anyway) and waiting for customers to come. You have to stay on the cutting edge of new trends, implement various techniques you learn, and put everything to good use before you can start building an online presence and working toward earning page rank.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of working to increase your ranks in the search engines, hopefully to the first page of results, if not the number one spot. It may sound simple, but the reality is it difficult work. If achieved, however, the benefits it provides to your business are worth the effort tenfold. Nothing of value is going to fall in your lap unless you work for it, and the same can be said for where your website ends up in the rankings.
SEO is an ongoing process with several distinct steps that, if followed and completed in a timely manner, will lead you to success. A good SEO plan will bring you a better return on your investment (ROI) than most other plans, especially online. In fact, SEO has been called “the most effective form of online marketing.”
SEO is not an instant process. It is not a one and done process. It is an on-going effort that consists of many steps. If steps are completed in a time manner, they will provide success. A killer SEO strategy will bring a better return on investment (ROI) than most other marketing plans, especially when it comes to online. SEO has been referred to as “the most effective form of online marketing” though some may argue social media is on its tail.
Let’s get started.
The goal is to bring in free traffic to expand your customer base so you have more people to market to. There are many different ways to do this, but they all come down again to three things: keyword choice, manipulation, and research.
Shortcut – It is possible to adjust your SEO until you’re blue in the face. The first 20% of your SEO will bring in 80% of your profits. Once you get something that works, don’t mess with it too much.
Here is a basic outline of steps I follow, and what works for me.
Choosing Your Keywords
Selecting the right keywords is the first thing you should do and will be the most important thing for your completed website. You need to find a balance between the competitive keywords that everyone else is going after and the less popular keywords that people are still searching for, but people aren’t competing for.
If no one is searching for information using the keywords you selected, no one will be able to find your website with a search engine. If your keywords are incredibly popular as search terms, your competition will prevent you from rising to the top of the results for those phrases.
To make it even more complex, you must choose keywords that relate to the buyers that you are trying to bring to your site. You can easily attract fire with cryptic headline or questions to spark curiosity, but you want to attract visitors were interested in buying what you have to offer. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? You don’t have to become a mind reader to get the job done.
You can make a list of keywords based on popularity and a list of keywords based on competition. Using a tool like WordTracker, you can get a list of suggested keywords based on popularity, to save you time.
How Do You Measure Up With Your Rankings?
You will not be able to move up in the page rankings until you understand where you are ranking right now for the keywords you have chosen for your website and your products and services. By now, you should have a list of relevant keywords your future customers are using to search. Add these keywords throughout your website content, in the title, Meta description, and Meta tags. When used in your copy, keep the keywords near the beginning, somewhere in the middle of the copy, and again toward the end.
When you are ready to find out where you stand in the eyes of the search engine, you can use the Google Page Rank Report for free. This is an online tool to check the Page Rank values for the list of URLs you enter. Once you know where you stand and why, you can focus your efforts into improving your ranking in the search engines.
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