One great way to drive quality traffic to your website, although you might find it to be a small amount on a daily basis is by forum marketing. Forums are organized into topics and people are already sharing their ideas on them. On one of my trial blogs, I went to a forum to let everyone know that I would be writing about my experiences with alternative medicines. I provided a the website. Before I knew it, my trial blog had 128 page views.
The huge benefit of forum marketing is that you’re talking with others in your already in your niche. At the same time you’re driving traffic to your site, you are conducting market research. You’re finding out the biggest problems in your niche, so that you can provide solutions in the form of an info products or website content.
Forum traffic is quality traffic. One hit quality traffic is often worth as much as a few hundred hits from a non-quality source. What makes it of quality is you’re getting traffic based on what you say in the forum. Your audience is already interested in what you have to offer based on the comments you post in the forum.
Your first step is to locate a forum and join. Create a profile with pertinent information about yourself and something to make you stand out a little. For example, you might label yourself a cheese afficionado. That will spark other people’s interest and make you stand out from other people who are just listing their professions.
In your signature, provide a link to your site along with a catchy quote from your website to get people’s attention.
Build your reputation as an expert in your niche. Provide quality information. Make sure you reply to comments and posts. Users of a forum will only click on the link in your signature if you’ve sparked their interst. One stratedgy you can use is to create a new thread with new ideas.
Do not link to your own site within content of threads. Only place a link to your website within the signature of the post. Almost all forums prohibit afiliate links in your signature or within the comments. Be sure to read forum rules and regulations before joining any forum. Do not spam a forum. You will be blocked.
Multimedia is the way to go. People like seeing videos, listening to podcasts and reading. Some prefer one over the other. I personally would rather read, but recommend using all three to capture the largest audience. I know my sister is not terribly excited about reading, but if I posted some audio weekly, she would visit the blog. It also keeps things interesting if you get to see a live person or visual presentation. It also puts a face to the person blogging and makes them a little more real.
From my own personal experiences, I’ve learned that people will return to blog sites to see what is new, so updating is vital to the success of a blog. A friend of mine had lofty weight loss goals. She started a blog to become accountable about what she ate. She posted her weight loss goals on her blog. Her food choices were listed the first two days. They were great. A week passed without any update to her blog and guess what, she gained weight. While blogging daily can be tiresome, a daily habit keeps you on track. If you think someone is counting on content being there to read, you want to make sure that it is there for them. Don’t lose readers because you were too lazy to update. Keep your readers coming back for more and you increase your opportunity for moneymaking.
Updating daily can be difficult. Some people tend to get writers block easily. Keep in mind that the content does not have to be your own. If you find someone else has posted some amazing video or audio, add a link to it. It will enhance your credibility as an expert in your field when you recognize others in the industry. Make sure you set goals to keep your blog fresh with multimedia, interesting and updated.
If I’ve learned anything from getting my Masters in Special Education, it is that you need to have goals if you definately want something accomplished. Sometimes other people are setting goals for you and you are jumping through the hoops and sometimes you set them for yourself. For example, in order to graduate everyone is assigned a counselor whose entire purpose is to ensure that you are taking the correct classes in order to graduate.
In order to succeed as a blogger, I’ve chosen to follow in the footsteps of other successful bloggers. Hey, no need to reinvent the wheel here. I’m not going into uncharted territory. The steps that I took prior to starting melindacurle.com were first to get my feet wet with a free trial blog. I used blogger.com. I just wanted to see if I could keep interested in a week. Then I took the plunge and signed up for a domain name. I toyed with the idea of something creative and cute, but decided to just keep it to my name because friends on facebook or twitter would easily recognize it as mine. Also, if my focus shifts to something other than internet marketing, I haven’t committed myself to a domain entitled Internet Marketing.
I still don’t have a lot of knowledge about technology. I realize that there is a lot for me to learn, so for one of the hours that I’m dedicating to blogging, I will spend actually learning how to blog. It took me a long time to figure out where to click to add my first post. And if you are looking at this on June 27 when I posted it, you can see I still haven’t figured out how to change their subtitle. I’m not really sure how I managed to get my title there.
Forty five minutes will be spent in the writing process. Fifteen minutes will be spent editing. I don’t like reading grammatical errors and I hate when I accidentally use them.
I plan to learn how to utilize multiple forms of social media. By the end of the month, I will post one audio of myself, one youtube video and have a weekly newsletter. Why use all those things? Because I want people to continue to visit my blog. Some people are interested in text, others want a podcast and some like free reports.
