I’ve been marketing online now for three years and managed to create an amazing social community of bloggers that generates more then 1200 unique hits a day with over 5.2 pageviews per visitor. I know the importance of generating traffic to your website or blog. I created Blog Engage in order to help other bloggers promote their blogs and generate traffic. The difference with Blog Engage and other social communities is the traffic is real bloggers like you and me.
I’ve managed to build this community by using many free online marketing methods to promote and market. I’ve used webmaster forums, blogs, online social communities, social media sites such as facebook, twitter and more. Today I would like to share with you how to take advantage of thees communities to both create value for their community and generate traffic to your own.
Webmaster Forums
I’m a very big fan of promoting all my blogs on the most popular webmaster forums. I’ve been so impressed by the return on investment that I have come up with a “how to guide” explaining how each forum can be used to market yourself and your blog.
Website Review Forums
This was by far one of my favorite forums to generate traffic. The greatest thing about this forum is when the people visit your blog they will be viewing more then one page. This means they have a good chance at seeing a few of your articles or at least a larger amount of your blogs content. Every time you change a theme, banner or anything else this thread can be bumped or even recreated to get the opinions of the forum members once again. Engage with the forum members making reviews on your website. Thank them for the time and respect their opinions. Try not to take offense you have to be able to accept constructive criticism.
Domain Name Appraisal Forums
When requesting appraisals on your blogs domain name don’t be afraid to drop the domain name in a link format. I did this and it generates tons of traffic. People like to view the url because the site always increases in value when it has an operating community or content of some sort.
The Freebies Forum
You know as well as I do most of the online webmaster forums have a Freebies section. This is a great place to promote your blog. Set something up on your blog that is free and add a link to your blogs main website. Make sure to keep your ideas targeted to your blogs niche. The freebies forum can also be used to exchange comments with other bloggers in some cases.
Buy Sell and Trade
This is a great forum to buy sell and trade things such as sidebar ads, link, services and other random exchanges. This will generate tons of traffic because all the forum readers will be visiting your site to see the quality of content and could in fact generate return visitors. Make sure to always include your blog link during these threads. The buyers want to view your blog for quality and content control.
Final note on Webmaster Forum Marketing
When marketing your blog in webmaster forums be sure to read the forums rules. All forums are different and some of these actions cannot be done. I would suggest joining forums such as digitalpoint, webtalkforums, namepros, bloggeries, ukwebmasterworld, warrioirforums and v7n. All these forums have the appropriate sub forums to market using these suggestions and methods. Remember to engage with the forum members and build discussions with them. You MUST keep your topics live and active so they get seem by more of the forums audience so be sincere and develop new online relationships.
Blog Commenting
I know I know you here this all the time. The reason I’m mentioning it is because I see it done wrong more then I see it blogged about. (Which is a lot) When you’re commenting on a blog you have to engage with that blogger. Your comment should be of value and encourage that blogger to return and visit your blog.
I would also suggest adding comment luv. By far it’s one of my favorite additions to my blog. I’m always following the bloggers that comment on my blog back to theirs, commenting and tweeting. This is a must for social media marketing to work via blog commenting. Building the relationship on a social level is key to our success.
Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter
Creating a facebook page for your blog is a must. This facebook page spreads like word of mouth. I set up the facebook blog engage page about a month ago and we have 350 people that have already liked it. I should had started it long ago but like you I’m still learning. Do as I say and not as I do, add the facebook fan page and like button into your marketing plan ASAP.
We all know twitter is am amazing marketing tool. Add a follow badge to your website or blog and start marketing your articles with their community. Follow your readers and build relationships with them. In return they will eventually market and tweet your articles. When one of your blog readers or followers tweet your article be sure to return the favor. It’s important to give back and not always be the one receiving.
Blog Engage
Blog Engage has a lot of great people in the community that are waiting for you to share your content. The point of the site is to submit your written content, members vote on it and if it’s engaged enough your article is published to the front page. For the record I am the founder and owner of Blog Engage so if this sounds bias it just may be. Blog Engage is a social networking community for bloggers and blog articles only.
BloKube
Dev is a dedicated member at Blog Engage and has started his very own social media marketing community. I recommend joining and participating. You will see many familiar faces there and again it’s a community full of blogger like you and me waiting to help share and promote with one another.
Feedback and Discussions
Let me know your thoughts on the topic and suggestions. Are you already doing this to promote your website or blogs? Have you been developing your online relationships using twitter and facebook? Do you have some other ideas we can add to the article on how to generate traffic from forums?? I would love to hear your thoughts I’m always open to a great discussion.
Be sure to add me as a friend, bbrian017
Twitter, @bbrian017
Thanks,
Brian
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