The other day, Spaceman3750 asked for more help on actually building readership to your blog on this post. That reminded me that I haven’t given a promotional tip for awhile, so I’m going to have to get my act together and start posting these more often! What the people want, the people get! Keep in mind, all of these techniques bring in small amounts of traffic…but when you add a whole bunch of small amounts of traffic together, it’s a large amount of traffic! Also, these are largely dependent on you having great content; if your content isn’t absolutely stellar, work on getting it up to that level before trying these promotion techniques.
Step 1: Hello Google, my old friend
We’re going back to forums today, but in a different vein. The first step is to take your blog topic, in Spaceman’s case Internet Security, and search Google for your topic and permutations of it with “forum” and “forums” on the end. So you might try “Internet Security” and “Net Security”, “web security”, etc. You are looking to generate a list of forums that are on the same topic or closely related to your blog.
How many forums there are will depend on how popular your topic is. You will have a much easier time finding Internet security forums than you will, say, finding forums on growing perennials on leap years in the midwest. So, if your blog topic is really really specific, try to expand the topic a bit to get more results. In the previous example you’d use “growing perennials” or “growing perennials in the midwest” for your search.
Step 2: Separate the wheat from the chaff
Once you have your list of related and closely related forums, you want to read the rules of each one and weed out any that don’t allow you to post a url in your signature - and register for the ones that do allow urls in the signature. If you can’t find the rules easily, just load up several large threads on the forum and look for signatures with urls in them.
Be careful, some forums (especially company forums) will only allow links in moderator’s signatures (which are links back to the company 99% of the time), so make sure you aren’t just seeing url links in a forum moderator’s posts. Also, if the forum appears to allow signatures, but you can’t add one, then it’s probably because they have a posting limit or other conditions to meet before you can post a link in your signature. Don’t worry about that, keep those forums on the list.
Step 3: Be part of the community (sorry, my wit has run dry)
It’s simple as that, start posting in the forum and while you discuss things related to your blog topic (which will help you become a better blogger anyway), you will be advertising your blog to people who are interested in the specific topic you’re blogging about.
You want to make sure you’re actually posting relevant and useful contributions to the discussions for two reasons. If your posts consist of mainly short quips of “LOLZ OH 4 SURE” or “right on dude, I agree”, you will likely piss off the administrator and may get banned, and even if he doesn’t, no one will notice you. If you have interesting things to add to the discussions at hand, people will take notice of your url and visit it to see what else you have to say. If you add nothing to the discussion, most people will not take notice or bother to visit your blog at all.
Good Profits!
April 30th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Thanks alot :D. Especially thanks for the link, that will help a lot :).
One comment on the spammy posts: I second Dave here. I have moderated forums for 2 or 3 years now, with a couple being big PR5/PR6 sites. We moderators HATE people who spam to get their link out there, it usually ends in some kind of warning or a ban. Only post if you are posting quality content.