One of the best free ways to promote your website is using forums. In order to fully harness the power of forum promotion, you need to do...
One of the best free ways to promote your website is using forums. In order to fully harness the power of forum promotion, you need to do three things:
- 1) Find the best 1 or 2 forums in your field
- 2) Create an account and start posting non-promotional, value-adding posts to build your reputation
- 3) Then and only then, begin to promote your product
Although the above three steps may seem simple, let's take a closer look at what each step entails.
Finding the Best Forums
Finding the best forum is mostly a numbers game. You should search for forums in your field in Google, by searching "[your field name] forum" and then be looking at the top results. You should generally pick the most active forums.
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A lot of times forums will show how many people are currently reading threads in the different categories of the forum. Other times, it will show how many members the forum has. Be careful evaluating forums using a total members-the total number of members is always much higher than the total number of active members posting consistently.
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A third method is to see how many total threads there are in the forum. If a forum only has 90 threads, it is probably not very active. However, if a forum has 100000 threads, chances are this forum is a popular forum. Finally, once you have a few potential candidates, you can check their traffic ranks on Alexa. This will tell you officially which forum receives more traffic.
There are a few situations when a forum that is not very highly populated can be better than one that has a few thousand active members. The most common of these is when there is a forum with highly involved members. Many times, these are paid membership forums costing anywhere from $5-$20/month to participate.
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However, because of the membership fees, you know that the members are committed to participating in the forum and there is a certain comradery that exists in paid forums that do not necessarily exist in free forums.
Begin Posting
Once you have picked your top 1 or 2 forums, you can start to build your reputation with the other members. Search the forum for threads that you feel you can truly weigh in on. Your goal should be to help the other members of the forum when they have questions and give feedback when it is asked of the forum. It should not be to market your website or product-not yet. If you start to build a relationship with a few members, try to nurture and build that friendship. These members will help you promote your product when you are eventually ready to promote it.
Promote Your Product
Finally, you have built up your reputation. You have at least 30 posts, have built a few relationships, and you have positioned yourself to promote a product without coming across like a spammer. The first thing you should do is include a link to your website/product in your forum signature.
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Next, you should reach out to a friend or two that you've made on the forum and ask them to check out your product. You may want to give it to them for free because once you do, this person will feel like they owe you a favor. Invite them to provide feedback on your product.
If they are really impressed, ask them if they would be comfortable telling the forum about it. Because you put your trust in them and got them involved early in the process, they will likely want to return the favor and help you out on the forum.
Once they post about your product in the forum, be sure to check the thread fairly often to respond to questions that other members may have about the product. By doing this, you are establishing yourself as an authority on the forum. This will hopefully give you more clout when you make other posts on the forum and will do wonders to improve your reputation.
Source: SamBrodie
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