Forum & Message Board Marketing
Webmasters need to use every marketing method that they can take advantage of and without using all the methods out there you’ll fall behind your competition quickly. There are plenty of marketing techniques out there that you need to use, and in this article we’re going to talk about the power of forum and message board marketing. You’ve might of already used these techniques in your marketing arsenal and if you have then that’s great, but if you haven’t or you rarely use this technique then you should consider using it more.
There is always at least one forum on every topic and many topics have hundreds of different forums available to them. You should gather a list of the forums in your niche and then join them all. You will need to make some posts on them all and get active in the community. On the forums you’ll be able to add a signature line which will appear at the end of all of your posts. You can use this line to add your website link so that you can get direct clicks and also backlinks. Forum backlinks can build quickly and add a lot of value to your current links. Some forums will require that you make a certain amount of posts before your signature line appears, don’t worry about this though and just patiently wait until you reach the amount of posts. Don’t go spam the boards as you’ll likely be banned for doing so.
For message board marketing you may have to add your link at the end of each of your posts, so make sure that you do so if it is required. There is no point helping out others on message boards unless you’re getting the backlink so be sure that you do in fact get a link for each post. Some popular message boards are the Yahoo message boards which covers basically every niche that you could imagine. You simply help people answer their questions and then you post your link under your answer. This will help you get traffic as these message boards are always busy and get great search engine rankings.
A lot of forums and message boards don’t allow do-follow backlinks which means your links won’t count in the search engines. You should try finding some that are do-follow so that you do in fact gain some backlinks from your hard work, but for popular boards with lots of traffic it isn’t so important. For instance the Yahoo message boards will allow you to post a link but it isn’t do-follow. I still recommend using this board though because it’s one of the busiest and on the internet and can bring in great targeted traffic for the lifetime of your website.
Don’t spam the boards or forums though as you’ll get banned and it will also look unnatural to the search engines if you get a couple hundred links one day and none the next. You should aim for the same amount of posts everyday and split them between the forums and boards you use. This way you’ll be able to not look suspicious to the search engines and they won’t penalize you for unnatural link building which trust me happens and isn’t pretty for that website owner.
