Writing for Your Wealth

If you’ve been promoting your websites (or eHow articles, Squidoo lenses, etc.) for a while, you may have already tried posting in forums to drive traffic. If you haven’t gotten much out of it, this article is for you. If you haven’t tried it at all, this article is also for you. If you’re just bored at work and looking for something to read, this article is for you too. (What can I say? I don’t like to discriminate.)

A busy forum already gets a lot of daily visitors. The idea is to leverage that site’s popularity and send some of those visitors your direction.

Here are the steps to make forum posting an effective mode of promotion:

1. Find the best forums in your niche

If the forum isn’t related to your niche (or doesn’t at least have the same demographic of readers), then posting there is going to be a waste of time insofar as promoting your site goes. So if you’re a writer blogging about triathlons, it behooves you to hang out in the triathlon forum instead of (or in addition to) all those writer forums.

Try Googling “niche + forum” or “niche + message board” to find popular ones in your field.

Good forums that can send you a lot of traffic will probably have thousands of members and tens of thousands of posts. Not only are you hoping those members might visit your site, but you might also get some “lurkers” and people who find the posts via search engine results.

Forums do come and go though so make sure the one you’re thinking of joining has people visiting today, not just at some distant point in the past.

2. Create a signature with a link to your site

The way you’ll get traffic from a forum is by posting a signature with a link to your site (most forum software allows you to create a blurb that automatically shows up under all your posts).

Before you get too excited about any particular forum you find, scan through the threads and make sure you see signatures with links at the bottoms of people’s posts. You want to be able to add an active link to your website. If you don’t see folks posting links in signatures, it’s likely the forum has terms of service that forbid it. You can usually find a “stickie” post or FAQ somewhere that states the rules of the forum, so you can double check there.

If your primary goal is to drive traffic to your site, it’s not worth participating in a forum that doesn’t allow signature links. Feel free to give these forums a virtual middle finger as you click the back button on your browser.

Creating an effective signature tag

As for the signature tag itself, the best way to find out what works is to change your blurb every couple weeks. See what entices the most people to click through.

For one of my early sites on home gyms, I posted in fitness forums to get visitors (hoping they’d come join my forum and chat it up).

A signature that worked well for me was along the lines of “Read [link]real people’s reviews of the Bowflex[/link] home gym, and get your questions answered in our [link]Bowflex forum[/link].” ( I was working out on a used Bowflex at the time, so I had written reviews and information on several of the company’s models for my site.)

It wasn’t brilliant copywriting but what it did well was ensure I only got visitors who were interested in what my site was about (Bowflex), and it also told folks exactly what they could find if they clicked (something useful). I got a lot of traffic that way, in part because I was posting on an already-popular site, and in part because my posts and signature attracted people who were interested in what my site was about.

While I’ve since moved on to other niches and that site has died off (and I’ve given away the Bowflex and joined a tennis club), I still find forum posting to be an excellent way to bring new visitors to a site.

But how do you make sure your signature links are noticed in the first place?

3. Become a thought leader in the community

This is where a lot of people fail when it comes to driving traffic through forum posting. They post “me too” comments, or they write intelligent posts… that are located half way down the 18th page in a thread.

If you want to be noticed, start topics instead of just contributing to others. And start topics that will catch people’s attention.

Watch the forum for a while and ferret out the trends. What are people interested in and how can you say something useful and original on that topic? (If this forum is related to the niche you already write about, this shouldn’t be that hard!)

Start threads that are helpful or controversial.

Helpful threads (i.e. How-to posts) attract a lot of eyeballs, because people are always looking for specifics on how to do things. A few months ago, I got a ton of visitors from a post I did at the Warrior Forum, which was named something like “Top Tips from a Six-Figure-a-Year Adsense Publisher.” Since it was in the Adsense section of the forum, you can guess there were a lot of readers looking for just those kinds of tips.

Controversial threads also attract a lot of eyeballs because people are eager to contribute when they have strong opinions.

The idea is to be on top of a thread that gets a lot of visitors and a lot of posts (the more people post, the longer your thread will be on the first page of the forum). This increases the chances of you (and your signature link) being noticed.

Now… go forth and post!