Don’t Sit and Watch TV on your backside!
Don’t Sit and Watch TV on your backside!
A weekly routine for forum owners.
Forums/Message boards grow at a rapid rate now a days, some reaching over 200 members a day! A great site which you should visit regulary is Big Boards , they hold the largest forums online. Gaia (a role playing forum) with over 1318923345 posts! Well back to the point, forums are so popular today and even replaced the good’oh chatrooms because when a member leaves the room, their messages disappear which disrupts conversations etc. While forums save the message(s) and allows topic discussions 24/7.
But to keep up with all these changes, rapid growth on the internet and the extremely intense competition with other forums, you will be needing to make daily/weekly advertising routines. With some basic (free) advertisement made daily or weekly, your forum will receive the traffic it deserves. (Depending on how well you execute the following tips).
Search Engines & Directories
A great way to improve traffic would be to submit to search engines. But to improve your search rankings would involve increasing the number of links pointing towards your forum. The size of the directory does not matter, even submit to small ones because theres a higher chance your link will be submitted, while large directories will have to go through a large list of spam links. So i recommend 1 directory and 1 search engine every week.
Link Exchanges/Affiliates
This is a top notch, simple but effective way to improve your forums traffic. Do not waste your time affiliating or link exchanging with forums which are not based around your topic, aim at exchanging with forums which are based around the same topic as you. Eg. Gaming etc.
And never forget, if it is a link exchange, make the most if it. Use highly convincing anchor text which will draw as many clicks as possible. If your making an banner affiliate exchange, design a extremely, eye catching button.
Lets say 1 exchange a week? If you can keep up with that rate consistently, i promise there will be a significant improvement in your activity.
Signatures
Signature advertising, one of the best form of advertisements thought of? Highly effective and its FREE! Alright, why is it such a wonderful tool? You can target your audience by advertising on a specific forum(s) which relate to yours (eg. Gaming, Webmaster etc). Depending on how effective your sig. advert. is, you will definitely gain numerous click-throughs. Visit my Effective Signature Advertising article for a better understanding on how to maxmize the click through rate. I highly recommend any forum owner to signature advertise daily. The only reason why my forum became so active (Known as Admin Chat) was because of how much i sig. advertised it. If you find it a lot of work, just make 1-5 posts a day at a range of 5-7 different, related forums.
Post Exchanges (Moderate)
Not much of an advertisement technique but you can by implementing a signature advert when you exchange posts with another forum. This form of exchange improves your forum activity by purposely requesting a member of another forum to post at yours while you return the favor as well. When your posting on the other forum, the quality of the topic reflects on what type of person you are. If you can create some amazing, interesting topics, members will look at you differently and may wonder what is hidden behind that link of yours. Lets say, 10 exchange posts made a week.
Spam, A BIG NO! NO!
Alright, let me tell you now, Spamming is a big No! No! Never spam! All it does is bring a bad reputation towards your forum. And may also result in spam-attacks at your forum.
Well i hope this simple article is helpful. Remember, advertise your forum regularly, don’t be lazy or your forum will slowly erode away.
Good Luck and Happy Reading my friend.
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.
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