Forums are great little tools when it comes to finding information you have been searching for online. I have a marketing forum right here on my site for you to check out as an example. Forums are also underestimate by many professional internet marketers.

Before I tell you how these forums bring you traffic, I want to help you find the right forum for you. Just like blogs have a niche, so does a forum. My marketing forum has a niche based on marketing, design, blogging, and other relevant related topics. You can also find forums on parenting where you can learn how to get rid of diaper rash.

It is extremely important for you to sign up and take part in forums that will bring you targeted traffic. Just signing up for any forum will not help you because the community there will not have any interest in your niche. As an internet marketing guy, I take part in forums like DigitalPoint, WebProWorld, and other like-minded forums. This allows me to take part in discussions that I am truly passionate about. I can contribute to those forum threads without hesitation or research, and because I share actual knowledge with confidence, it brings me traffic that converts into readers and subscribers.

You can easily find forums that are related to your niche by searching Google. For example, you can do a search in Google like this: “independent musicians forum”, and a list of free forums will pop up. You can go to the forum to varify that it contains categories and topics you are interested in, and are related to your blog. You can even search for “forum directory”, and track down your desired forum by category.

DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG

Once you find the forum(s) you are interested in, you can sign up and fill out your profile. It is vital that you fill out your profile before you start posting threads and replies as your profile will contain your website URL and contact information as well as your bio. Just like Twitter, people go to profiles of people that post valuable content to learn more about that person.

When you are customizing your profile, it is important to create a “signature” that follows the forums rules. Some forums allow you to post links. The number of links and what you can link to is usually spelled out by that forum in a “forum rules” section. Follow those rules to the “T” otherwise you can end up banned from the forum. The whole point here is to drive traffic to your blog or niche site, and not to get banned. Some forums require a certain amount of posts before they allow you to use a signature in order to reduce spam.

There are forums like DigitalPoint that allow the automatic posting of your latest blog post by importing your rss feed. This is a great way to drive traffic based on a blog title. It’s also a great example of why it’s important to post a good blog title.

When you have your automatic linking methods in place, and your profile filled out completely, it is time to get noticed. The most important thing here is to add to the community that a forum is meant to be. The last thing you want to be noticed as is a spammer. There are two ways to add to the community.

1. Reply to existing forum threads with a comment that adds to the discussion.
2. Start a new thread with a statement or a question that’s relevant to the category. I will tell you right now that questions get the most responses unless you post a controversial statement.

As long as you follow the rules of the specific forum you are on and you add to the discussion like you would in a blog comment area, then you will drive traffic back to your website.

Do you utilize forums to bring in traffic?

As you know, guest posting is a great way to drive traffic to your own blog. It is also a great way to build backlinks. But how do you decide where you are going to guest post? The title of this post made it sound like I am holding a grudge because I don’t get a lot of requests to guest post here on the “make money blogging” blog. I am a bit offended, but honestly I see it as you not knowing what’s in store for this blog.

When this blog is updated in the PageRank system, it is going to be a good thing. I track my inbound links through Google Webmaster Tools, and other methods. My older posts are going to receive some of that PageRank, and it is unfortunate that you will not benefit from that positive thing.

You may have assumed that it is not worth guest posting here because I am not yet in the top 100k Alexa Traffic Rank sites. But I will be VERY SOON. Think about this for a minute. Some of my fellow bloggers have been blogging for longer than I have, and I have already surpassed them in Alexa Rank by thousands. This blog has only been up since late February 2010, so my current traffic rank of 116,000 is something of an achievement. Take my word for it that I am an expert internet marketer, and my work is paying off here.

Will I turn you away when I am in the top 100,000 Alexa sites? Yeah, probably. At that point, I am going to be more skeptical of your reasoning for guesting here. I will know that rather than wanting to add something unique with value to my blog, you may just want the traffic and backlink. I would be more likely to accept a guest post from someone who comments on my blog regularly, but that doesn’t mean the article wouldn’t be scrutinized. Out of my regular readers, I have only had two published guest posts so far from them.

My reason for this article is to draw it to your attention that it is important to guest post on smaller blogs because you have no idea how powerful they will eventually be. Of course you want to do some due diligance to ensure that you are guesting on a blog that will last, but you can only do that research so far. You already know by now that my blog is here to stay. You also know that I care deeply about the content that I product. Unlike some bloggers, I carefully choose the affiliate offers I promote too. The last thing I want is to establish a bad reputation for affiliate promotion on bunk products.

Are you picking your guest posting blogs wisely?

Coming from someone with experience, I am here to tell you that you can’t have your cake and eat it to. What I mean by this is that when you first start out, you want loads of blog traffic and comments on every single post. You may have come across blogs that have hundreds of comments on a single post. But those blogs with hundreds of comments have been around for years. Those blogs either collected that amount of comments over many years, or that blog is run by a celebrity or popular person and gets flooded with daily traffic.

As a new blog, you have to consider the following. Consider that if you post an article (or more than one) every single day, you are likely to only get a few comments on that post within the first week. Readers get overloaded with the vast amount of content you have available and they cannot comment on every single one right then and there. The reader may come back on another day to comment on an old article, but then they might end up not commenting on the newest article.

If you were to sacrifice your search engine optimization and traffic rank, you can spread out your blog articles and end up receiving more comments per post. The reason for this is that your articles stay on the homepage for much longer and readers have time to read them.

There is a very fine balance of going after both comments and article-count. The only sure-fire way to get that amount of commentary on daily articles is to actively promote your blog via Google Adwords CPM and other high traffic immediate sources. Another way obviously would be to break some serious news that nobody else reported yet (will the next iPhone whistle-blower please stand up?).