How to Promote Your Site in Forums
TweetForums are a great way to promote a web site and I have been using them to drive traffic to mine for years. The best way to get people to come to your site is through an indirect link to your site from a signature file, which appears below each one of your posts. I have found this works better than just an outright "come visit my site" plug which tends to just aggravate and annoy other forum members. Let's take a look at how you can start increasing your traffic number through the use of forums.
Finding Forums
To get the most out of your traffic you are going to have to find a forum within your particular niche. It is not going to do you much good to post a link to your women's clothing site if you are in a men's weight lifting forum. How do you find a niche forum? Do a search in Google. After you have found a forum go through some posts to see if they allow signature files with outgoing links. Then repeat until you have from 3-10 forums that you can post in.
Register in the Forums
After you have your list it's time to go through and register your username in the forums, I would make it similar to the brand for the site that you are promoting. Then I would upload your logo as your avatar. When creating your signature, make sure you use some keywords as your anchor text back to your site. This way you get some SEO benefits, but make sure that you vary your keywords on each forum and change it from time to time.
Posting Messages
The key to posting on the forums is to add something of value to the topics being discussed. If you just go posting spam and worthless comments trying to plug your site then you are going to do more damage to your brand than you are going to help your site via the traffic you receive. The key is to show your expertise in the niche so that normal people will want to find out more about what you have to say on the topic by clicking through to your site. You will also want to post comments in the threads that are getting the most page views, but the real gem comes when you are able to start your own thread that really takes off as a forum classic.
So there you have it, a simple guide as to how you can promote your site in forums. Do you have any other suggestions? Let's hear about them in the comments.