Chapter #1 of my upcoming book…for your reading pleasure

Posted by John

October 17, 2007

Site Promotion Using Forums, Blogs and Groups

In today's Internet market, there are many ways to promote your web site. In order to surpass your competitors, it has become necessary to employ non-conventional methods of site promotion. Putting a tattoo on your forehead that contains your URL is one non-conventional site promotion method (this one has been done already), however, if the tattoo artist makes a mistake, you could be sending all of your potential visitors to a porn site hosted in Russia, instead of where you really want them to go.

One of the approaches I will describe here is to allow systems that are already in-place to be components in the engine that is your marketing plan. Specifically, I am
talking about forum software, blogs, and interest groups.

Procedure

Forums, blogs and groups are web sites that allow groups of people to hold interactive discussions on various subjects by posting statements, questions and comments in a non-interactive manner. Unlike chatting, where you type in a statement and get an immediate response from the person you are chatting with, forums, blogs and groups allow users to enter posts at their convenience. The post is then available for everyone who is a member of that site to see.

Having everyone see your post is not enough to get your web site promoted unless you include something about your site in the post text, which brings me to the “Appetizer” of this section. Most forum and group sites contain a feature which allows you to create a signature that gets attached to all of your posts. It’s within this signature that you must include the URL to your web site.

Benefits

With the above information, you are now including your signature with every post to blogs, forums and groups. The benefit of this effort is that the following will occur:

Everyone who visits the forum, group or blog will see your web site address
Forums, blogs and groups typically have subscription capability, which sends an email out to every member who subscribes (push)
RSS feeds are also available. When a message is posted, it will be pushed out to all subscribing users via their feed reader

I've done some research and a lot of the professional SEO people are talking about using forums and blogs as a legit way to promote your site. Sushith Mundayadan even gives 10 tips on the best approach here: http://brokencodes.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-to-use-forums-topromote-your.html

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© Copyright 2009, John A. Simpson. All Rights Reserved.