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Resources One of the best ways to market your site and gain free traffic is to post helpful information on something in an online forum. The tactic is simple because it makes sense. The people who want to buy the product are looking for the information that you have to offer. With that in mind, any efforts you can spend being helpful and providing solutions to them will pay off with new members. This simply means: Provide free useful advice for them with incentives to go to your site for more information Your Game Plan
The Alexa Toolbar will give you a general idea of how much traffic the site gets. The lower the number the better. Its not full proof but its a pretty good indicator that you can compare to equal sites. Finding The Forums Now that you have the Alexa bar installed, its time to find the forums. Google will make this job pretty easy. Use the keywords which relate to your site's topic. Let's say you had a site dedicated to eating healthy. You could search google for these terms: home fitness +forum Focus on the keywords for your particular topic. Then pair it up with +forum when searching. As you visit these forums pay attention to the Alexa scores in comparison to each other. By comparing several forums, you will be able to determine which ones get more traffic to them compared to the others. Look to see how active the forum is. If no one posts for weeks at a time, then its not worth wasting your time over. If there are posts every day then its worth paying attention to.
I recommend you spend one hour the first week just indentifying high traffic forums in your niche, and then saving them in your bookmarks. Now The Payoff
3 times a week for 20 minutes at a time, stop by these forums that you bookmarked. Scan through the topics and discussions. What ever opportunities you see to offer helpful advice or tips, go ahead and post them. Really concentrate on making them high quality posts which provide specific answers to someone's problems. Then simply sign off with your name and a link to your site underneath.
Most sites don't mind this sort of "signature line" as
long as you don't abuse the priviledge. Things To Keep In Mind You want to make sure that these forums are a good potential for your to post in. Not just from a traffic stand point but also whether other people are providing similar guidance in there. Some of the most helpful forums I know have a lot of people giving specific answers as well as solutions. If you review certain forums and that isn't the case, then your posting efforts may not be appreciated there. There is one critical aspect of all of this. Your posts MUST be informative and helpful, with zero sales pitch to it. Your goal isn't to try and sell them on anything. Instead you want to be helpful and then let them want to naturally find out more about what you have to offer. That's when they visit your link. Attempts to post just for the sake of getting a link or an affiliate link will often be construed as in bad taste. When your postings in there are from the standpoint of simply being helpful, you will be much less likely to run into any trouble. This tactic has served myself and others quite well in the past. A few good forums to look at to get started are:
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