How Do You Find Forums to Participate On?
I mentioned the other day that I’m trying to get back into forum participation as a method of website promotion. The trick is finding active forums.
It’s not that there aren’t tons and tons of forums out there. It’s that so many have next to no participants.
Forum participation is one of those things where you should be looking at getting people to pay attention to what you say and building a good reputation. Do that and people will follow your signature links. You’ll want to change them periodically to keep things interesting.
Big Boards is one source for large forums in a range of categories. Check out reasonably relevant ones and see who will let you have signature links. Some will, some won’t, some will for a fee.
You can also do a search on your niche + forum in your favorite search engine. The top ones on the list may have enough visitors to be of interest to you.
Beware the Time Suck!
The one trouble with forums is that they can be a huge time suck. The discussions get interesting!
Set time limits for how long you can spend on forums and limit how many times a day you can visit. You may feel the need to bend the rules if something of particular interest to your niche is going on, but be careful about that.
Don’t get sucked into drama. It’s too likely to make you look bad and eat up a ton of your time. Be professional, appropriately personal and helpful.
Traffic? Please? Traffic?
Forums may or may not send traffic. I’ve had variable luck with them.
Relevance is a part of the equation. The more relevant your forum signature links are, the better the chance that people will check them out.
Your own posting skills also play into it. Most forums won’t like it if you keep saying things like “check out the site I’ve linked to in my signature” as that’s too close to spamming. But if your posts are helpful people may want to check you out.
Similarly, your signature has to make your site look interesting. A plain link to your site probably won’t get many clicks. A keyword link may do slightly better. A signature that includes some information plus a link is likely to do better.
