Forum Marketing: The Secret SEO & Traffic Boost
Published on February 22, 2018
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Forum Marketing is a topic/strategy that is often underrated. I used to think that Forum Marketing in not effective, too time-consuming, etc...
However, if done right, Forum Marketing can have a huge benefit for your website going forward. I'll explain why in this post.
(Read till the end because I'll reveal to you my secret place to get targeted traffic and backlinks! Shh...)
What is Forum Marketing?
Forum Marketing is basically participating in discussions with the intention to HELP others and grow your own brand/business/website at the same time.
Basically, you would like to join Forums that are relevant to your niche and join the discussions.
Your main goal is to help people so you should probably take half an hour every day to answer questions you know and give them solutions.
Should you have any questions, just ask it in the forum to let other people to help you as well.
How does Forum Marketing help my SEO & Traffic?
Members in the forum which is relevant to your niche are actually highly targeted audience for your website. Many of them will probably benefit from the information or products you sell on your website.
So how do you drive them to your website?
By being an authority in the discussion and offer them help. At the same time of answering and helping them, you can include your website or post link whenever suitable.
The links you insert in the forum are considered backlinks to your website so it definitely helps your SEO as well!
That's how you genuinely ATTRACT your target audience to your website.
You don't go out there simply asking people to visit your website for more information or help. You need to put yourself into their shoes.
Ask yourself, what kind of answer/help you will like and trust the most? You'll definitely trust people who genuinely want to help you instead of just dropping a link and ask you to read.
So your goal is to add as much value as possible to the forum/community and then ATTRACT people to you.
Insert your links whenever suitable so that people will be really interested to learn more from you. In order for that to take place, you need to show them that you know your stuff and you can help them.
Forum Marketing Tips
However, you may find that some forums do not allow you to insert any link if you're new. That's why you need to actively participate in the discussions.
After a while, you'll be allowed to post links. Then you can start inserting links naturally.
This same concept and strategy is the same for Facebook Group Marketing.
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Basically, you want to become the person that people want to ask you questions or ask you for help.
This takes time, just like SEO. SEO and Forum Marketing are both effective Free Traffic Strategies.
The disadvantage of Free Traffic is that it takes time but if you're willing to put in consistent effort, you'll see the results.
In fact, Kyle recommended me to post at least 5 posts per week if I want to make it to Vegas with organic SEO. It is totally possible and that's why you need to put in consistent hard work for Free Traffic. On top of that, you need PATIENCE!
As for Paid Traffic, you can have a much much faster result. FYI, @mrronnie made it to Vegas 2018 in just a couple of months' time. He only joined WA in June 2017.
That's possible because he has experience in paid traffic and he utilized paid traffic to generate massive traffic and leads.
The downside of paid traffic is that you need to expect to lose money at the start and there will be a lot of trial and error.
For more information on Free & Paid Traffic, I would recommend you to read Ronnie's awesome post here:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/mrronnie/blog/paid-vs-free-t...
How to Find Forums?
You can look for relevant forums in your niche by doing a simple Google search.
Just type YOUR NICHE + FORUM and you can easily find the relevant forums.
If you're in the online marketing/make money online/affiliate marketing niche, here are some forums for you:
My Secret Place!
Quora :)
(That's not really a secret but I believe a lot of people underestimate the power of Quora...)
Quora is a Q&A site which basically covers every single niche/topic. You can find almost everything there.
No matter which niche you're in, there will be people asking questions related to your niche.
The best part about Quora?
Everybody can join and offer your answer to people's questions. AND you can always add your website links into all your answers!
But remember to do it naturally and genuinely. Because we are in the business of helping people!
Quora is not only a good place to get targeted traffic and backlinks, you can often find lots of post ideas for your website as well. Other people's answers and questions will offer you a lot of inspiration for your next post.
So I would highly recommend you to spend around half an hour everyday to login to Quora. You can do anything there, be it answering people's questions or collecting post ideas or even asking your own questions. It'll be very helpful!
You can filter the questions by interests so you'll get all the related questions & answers that you're interested in or are relevant to your niche.
Another similar place is Yahoo Answers!
You can do the exact same thing at Yahoo Answers except that you can't have backlinks pointing to your website.
I've tried inserting links in Yahoo Answers. It does allow me to submit it but my link was not hyperlinked, so no backlink. Unless people copy your link and paste it to their browser.
So, that's the downside of Yahoo Answers.
Conclusion
Forum Marketing is a pretty useful and effective Free Traffic method so you shouldn't ignore or underestimate it.
If I'm not wrong, Forum Marketing is not included in the main training here at Wealthy Affiliate. So I hope my post can help you as much as possible.
Go look for relevant Forums for yourself and remember to join Quora!
I hope this post has been beneficial to you. If you find this post helpful, please give me a like and let me know what you think in the comments below :)
What's the best Traffic Generation method that is working for you right now? Let me know below! I want to learn from you as well...
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