Do you know the biggest challenge most new bloggers facing is driving traffic to their blog? Most new bloggers give up on their blogging journey because their blog doesn’t have any website visitors. They don’t know how to hijack free traffic instantly to their blog at the beginning. The answer is through forum marketing.
In this article, I will explain my personal experience on how to do forum marketing to promote your blog. Most people will think that forum is dead. However, the fact forum still works well to drive traffic, leads, and sales. It’s a great place to promote yourself right off the bat in front of a targeted audience on your niche.
When you just started your blog, your website doesn’t have domain authority yet. Therefore, it will be difficult for you to rely on Google traffic initially since it will take time to collect backlinks to your site.
On the other side, most new bloggers will get advice to start working on Pinterest in the first place while waiting for Google traffic to kick off. Well, nothing wrong with that. Some niches will perform great on Pinterest, while other niches may not.
It will be great if you can start driving free traffic instantly to your blog daily to start seeing some visitors stats on your Google Analytics account. One of the best places to get instant eyeball to your blog is through forum marketing. When I just started launching my blog. I decided to jump into the forum as the first place to promote my blog to see how the forum can drive instant free traffic to my blog.
Using forum marketing will allow you to get website visitors daily by participating in the forum discussion. You need to become a helpful person who provides valuable comments. This way, forum members will start recognizing you and trust you as an expert in your niche.
Driving instant free traffic to your blog needs consistency. Hence, you must have passion and knowledge of your niche, or your comment will not stand out on the forum. I myself utilized forum marketing to drive consistent visitors to my site when I started my blog. In this blog post, I will share my personal experience driving instant free traffic to my blog Ebiz Strategic.
In this blog post, I will share my exact strategy to drive instant free traffic to my blog using forum marketing and the key takeaways you can learn. So, you can utilize the forum as one of your traffic sources to widen your audience. But, before we jump into the strategy to drive free traffic to my blog through forum marketing, let’s start with what forum marketing is.
Table of Contents
What is Forum Marketing
Forum marketing is a way you promote yourself as an expert on public forums so people will trust your answers and recommendations. This is effective organic marketing to hijack an eyeball to your offer since you will show yourself to an active forum member.
I would recommend finding a specific niche forum relevant to your blog to promote yourself as an authority figure and build trust. The benefit of using forum marketing is that you can utilize the signature line below your post.
What is the signature line? It’s an empty box below your post. It’s like an identity card of yourself to promote your business. So, you can promote everything under your signature line. In this case, you will drive instant free traffic to your blog using the forum signature.
The signature line with a hyperlink to your blog will bring instant free traffic to your blog since the forum itself has consistent website visitors. So, it’s like a shortcut to get the traffic directly to your blog.
While building your instant free traffic from Forum marketing, I would also advise you to learn and work on Google SEO on your blog post for long-term passive traffic. You will also need to build a do-follow backlink to increase the domain authority of your blog. Kindly keep in mind forum backlink to your blog will be marked as a no-follow backlink.
How to Find Forums to Promote your Website
Before we start forum marketing, you will need to find the 2-3 best forums relevant to your blog niche. The good news is finding the best forums to promote your blog can be found easily, and it’s free. First, ensure the forum that you want to participate in, allowing the signature line to promote your blog.
Second, ensure the forum has a decent amount of monthly active visitors. You can check the monthly website visitors through SimiliarWeb.com. The more visitors the forum has, the bigger your opportunity to drive traffic to your blog.
Here are the two best resources you can use to find the best niche forums for your blog.
Google Search
First, you can find forums through the Google search engine. Simply go to the Google search bar and type Best [your blog niche] + forums. Let’s see an example if you want to find a fishing forum. You will type “Best fishing forum.” Then Google will recommend the best fishing forums in which you can participate.
Findaforum.net
Second, you can use websites such as findaforum.net to narrow down your search on specific niche forums. In addition, the website will provide you with a list of forums you can utilize as additional resources besides forum lists from Google search.
How to Do Forum Marketing
After you have decided on the best forums in your niche that you want to participate in, it’s time to create an account on the forum and introduce yourself to the forum as a new member.
On some occasions, several forums will have specific requirements to obtain a signature line under your post. For example, you need to have seniority, like one month, a certain number of posts or likes before getting the signature line. In addition, some forums will require you to upgrade your membership to get a signature line. It will vary for each forum.
My blog Ebiz Strategic is a blog about making money online niche, so I like to be active on the Blackhatworld forum as the biggest internet marketing forum. The forum is very active. The post on the forum homepage is quickly replaced by the new post every 3-5 minutes.
Here are the best strategies that I implement to boost my blog visitors from forum marketing when I first started my blog.
Strategy 1: Create a Good Signature that Grabs Curiosity
The first strategy is creating a good signature that grabs curiosity which makes people want to click it. This is the first step you need to do before participating in the forum discussion. You need to learn how to craft a good signature to drive click-through rate (CTR) to your blog. I will recommend you shorten your link on your signature using bit.ly so you can track daily clicks you receive from each forum.
Basically, a good signature needs to have these five elements below:
Headline: Creating a powerful hook headline that grabs attention and curiosity
Think number: Putting a number can be attention-grabbing
Aesthetic fonts: Bold, italic, underline, bracket, color, and capital letter
Concise: Straight to the point
Hyperlink: Only put 1 to 2 links to drive click
Let’s say I will craft a good signature line for the weight loss forum. Here is an example of a good signature by using those five elements above.
[DIET HACKS] How to Lose Weight 10 POUNDS in 2 WEEKS!
Some forums will allow you to have a banner signature. If all the forum members use signature lines in the text, having a banner signature to promote your blog post will make you stand out. Here is the banner signature example that I used on the Blackhatworld forum, still using the five elements of a good signature. This banner signature below can grab people’s attention to check it out.
You can change your signature topic every two weeks because the same people will come back to the forum. So, you can try to promote another blog post on your signature. This way, the forum members will know that you have new content, so they will tend to click your signature.
If the forum has search traffic from Google, such as Blackhatworld. It means new members keep coming to the forum, which means more opportunities for you to market your signature.
Here we can see that the Blackhatworld forum has 23% traffic from Google search based on SimilarWeb, which is good. It means more opportunities for you to market your signature because search traffic keeps bringing new visitors to the forum.
Since the forum has around 2M visitors every month, I don’t need to change my signature too often. The smaller the audience size of the forums means you need to change your signature topic more often. I can say the people coming to the forum is a mix of an old and new member.
Strategy 2: Comment on Thread and Provide Value
The second strategy I used is participating in the thread conversation by putting a value on my comment. The signature that I used to promote my blog initially is about a free traffic guide to make money on Clickbank. Here is the picture of the signature I used at that time.
Even though my signature is about Clickbank, there will be other members inside the forum who will be interested in coming and reading my blog post. So, don’t limit yourself only to participate in specific threads only such as Clickbank and affiliate marketing, but also try to participate in different threads to reach a wider audience.
You can spare your time every day by answering questions people ask in the forum. The more comment you put on the forum, the higher your chance your signature will be found and get clicked.
If you provide valuable comments, your post will stand out amongst other forum members. People on the forum will be curious about you and click your signature line. This is the way you can get instant free traffic using forum marketing.
The name of the game here is giving helpful information. You need to do it consistently every day, so the traffic keeps coming to your blog. All the comments that you have put on each thread will be there forever in the forum.
So, if other members are looking for specific queries on the forum and found the thread where you have put your valuable comment. It can help you to get residual free traffic to your site if the person clicks your signature, even when you’re not active on the forum anymore.
That’s why putting valuable comments will move the needle. It will make you stand out. You don’t have to write a very long comment, as long as your comment is straight to the point and provides value. Forum members will appreciate your response and click your signature.
So, you need to be consistently commenting on the forum to keep driving free traffic to your blog. The number of posts your put will be directly proportional to the traffic coming to your blog.
Strategy 3: Create a Thread and Share Great Content
Creating a thread will help to boost the traffic to your blog. It’s because every time other forum members are commenting on your thread. The thread will be bumped up to the top, which means more eyeballs to your thread.
When people click your thread, they will be prompted to the thread’s first page, where people will read your thread and see your signature line. If you share something valuable, they will be more likely to click your signature line.
You can share several topics on your thread, such as how-to guide, case study results, journey, or reviews. When I created my first thread on the Blackhatworld forum. I share the case study results from my blog post about Shopify Dropshipping selling POD products through collaboration with the artist.
This thread gets a good response from the forum’s members. I got so many comments on my thread and boosts in traffic to my blog. I will share my Google Analytics results in the next section.
Here is the picture of my signature line to promote my blog post when creating a thread.
I would like to recommend you create a thread once a week or every two weeks. If you don’t have any topic to share. You can repurpose your blog content as your thread topic on the forum by summarizing the important point from your blog. Another alternative, you can summarize other blog post content from Google. Creating a helpful thread will show you as an authority figure.
Forum Marketing Strategy Key Takeaway [Results]
Do you want to know the traffic results to my blog Ebiz Strategic after implementing those strategies? I start promoting my blog through forum signature from the last week of February 2021. I admit it’s difficult for me to comment on the forum every day consistently. But I have done my best to comment around 2-4 comments on a day for two weeks.
So here is the Google Analytic result of my blog by being active in the forum.
You can see that most of the traffic to my blog comes from the Blackhatworld forum, which I focus on since the forum has around 2M monthly visitors.
So what is the key takeaway that I learned after implementing those strategies above? I can conclude that putting a comment on the forum can help you get instant free traffic daily to your blog.
Unfortunately, in my case, I couldn’t put a comment consistently every day. But still, there is residual traffic coming to my blog even though I wasn’t active in the forum for one month. Looks interesting!
Here is a rule of thumb you need to know. The traffic coming to your blog will be directly proportional to the number of comments and threads. Therefore, the more comments and threads you put on the forum, the higher the traffic is coming to your blog.
In addition, creating valuable and unique content on your thread can boost the traffic to your blog. In my case, the traffic boosts up when I created my first thread on the Blackhatworld forum. This is because I share valuable content about Shopify dropshipping POD through collaboration with the artist from my blog post, which drives interest for the forum members.
In terms of bounce rate, 50% of the visitors from the Blackhatworld forum will be interested in reading other pages on my blog. Moreover, the average session duration from the forum is 02:43, which is good enough to promote your affiliate offer or your product on your blog.
Hence, I would like to suggest you start utilizing forum marketing, which can help to diversify your traffic source. While for new bloggers, it will be great to kickstart your blog visitors through forum marketing since the audience here is more laser targeted for your blog niche. You can get instant free traffic to your blog from forum marketing and also build your authority.
In Conclusion
Forum marketing is a great marketing strategy for every new blogger to get instant free traffic to their blog and build authority. Ensure you know exactly how to do forum marketing to hijack the traffic inside the forum.
Overall we can summarize forum marketing in several steps. First, find the best forum in your niche and ensure that the forum you participate in has a signature line on their post. Then, create your account and participate in the forum by commenting regularly. You can create a thread also every 1-2 weeks to hijack free traffic to your blog.
While working on forum marketing on a daily basis, I will also recommend expanding your free traffic channel to diversify for mid and long-term traffic, such as Pinterest and Google SEO. Here you can read another free traffic source to promote your blog.
I hope my article will be useful for you, take action by searching the top forum on your niche, creating your account, and participating in the forum discussion. Then, you should start seeing instant free traffic coming to your site.
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