One of the hot terms in Internet marketing over the past few years has been to "engage your community" to attract people to your site. With the rise of social media there are lots of conversations going on about your niche and by building relationships with these members you can get more links to your site, build your brand recognition, and get more customers. How exactly can you successfully engage your community and get more traffic and sales? It's not all that hard.
Find the Community
The first step to engaging an online community is to actually find them. The obvious places to look are Facebook pages and groups, and Twitter. All you have to do is search for your keyword terms in their built in search boxes and look through the results. It's also beneficial to search for forums (Google "(keyword) forums"). Forums might not be as popular right now, but a lot of times they are places that a large group of people interested in your niche have gathered together for an extended period of time, making them a dedicated group.
How to Engage Your Audience
Nobody likes the person who comes into their community and tries to endlessly promote themselves without adding anything back. If you do that you could get banned, but even if you don't you aren't going to make many friends.
You know what the members will like? An expert who helps them out. Forums are a perfect place to find an archive of questions that people in your market have had. If you want to engage your market, answering their questions and becoming known as a helpful expert in the field is the easiest way to do that. Plus, it's a great way to find content ideas for your site.
Getting Links & Referrals
So someone in an online community asks a question and you know the answer. If you post a quick reply, you might make a few friends with your knowledge, but you won't generate many links to your site nor refer many prospective customers that way. The best way I have found to answer the question is to write a detailed article covering the solution or answer, then give a short summary in response to the person who asks the question with a link back to your site. If you have a decent following on Twitter and Facebook, I'd even repost the question with a link to the answer. This should generate additional tweets, Facebook likes, and referrals from others.
This is the best way to engage online communities. Find out what the people are talking about in your market and then contribute something of value to their conversations.
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Forums 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.
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