03.22.06

Forum Posting for Website Traffic

Posted in Traffic Generation at 11:38 pm by Paul

In the early days of the internet I ran a stock picking website. Basically I would just write about stocks that I found interesting (internet and biotech), and then spam the heck out of finance message boards with my URL. I received a lot of traffic that way. I also received a lot of complaints about spamming good threads. These were the days before spam was the big deal it is today, and I stopped once it started to become a big deal. Because these were the days before PPC,  I never made much money from the sites. I didn’t really care though, I just wanted to see how much traffic I could get.

Fast forward to today. It is harder then ever for a non-connected website owner to get organic traffic. The web is bigger then ever, and competition is fierce. Plus, as a website owner, you are fighting with paid advertising for visitors.  It may take a year or more for your website or blog to show up in the top 10 or 20 search results. If the subject of your site is highly competitive, you might not show up higher than the first 30 results ever. It’s also difficult to get others to link to your PR0 or PR1 website, especially if they are PR3 or higher.

This is where it’s important to start tooting your own horn on message boards and forums. Now I’m not recommending spamming message boards. This is a big no-no these days. But let’s say you have a web design blog. You have written a great article on web design. Information you think every web designer should see. The first thing you’ll want to do is sign up for http://del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that you can use to post and track your favorite bookmarks. It also lets others see them as well. Once you sign up, post your article to your del.icio.us bookmarks. If it is good, other users will click on it and post it to their bookmarks, and so on and so on.  If the article is really interesting, post it to digg.com. They are an aggregation website of all that’s interesting in tech and science on the web. Users control the content, and it is the number #1 way to get huge amounts of free traffic on the net today.

Your next step is to get out there and start looking for the most popular forums on your topic and sign up. Start taking part in conversations on forum topics you are interested in. Mention items from your own blog articles, and link to it. You should also post your site’s URL at the end of each post you make. Or, if possible, put it in your forum signature so you don’t have to constantly type it out. If you actually say something intelligent people will visit your site. But if you just look like a spammer, forget about it. Most likely you will be banned from the board as well. If you get to be a respected member of the board/forum, you will be able to just post links to your blog posts outright, without having to explain to people why they should click through. People will respect you enough to know that you are going to be saying something useful in your blog articles. They will know that you aren’t just spamming for traffic.

Forum posting  also has another nice side effect, you will make countless friends in your field of interest, who will be more than happy to link to your website if asked.

I hope you found the above ideas useful. Good luck to you, and may all of your traffic be organic.

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