10 Ten Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

Notice: This is a discussion thread for comments about the SitePoint article, 10 Ten Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums.


Some very sound advice here, particularly the guidance on etiquette and the principal purpose of forums.

In terms of not self-promoting on someone else’s forum, would you be against creating a username that reflects your own site? For instance, if your site was SEOExperts.com, would it be bad manners to create the username ‘SEOExperts’?

I tend to get traffic everyday from forums, but the biggest thing is they are usually there only for free information. And we all know that free means I am not making any money.

MY primary purpose is to discuss on any seo technics problems in Forum. I’m member of Forum from last month. I got good knowledge here.

Dude, this was not all that good. It wasn’t 10 rules to drive traffic to your forum, it was 10 rules on what you as a user should do when visiting any forum.

Sorry man, sharpen up, this did not give me anything to take with me on any possible forum-building. Maybe a good “rules at this forum”-section…

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same amount of time to post on forums these days but when I did post more regularly, I would notice a fair bit of traffic coming from Sitepoint.

Aye, and the title: “Driving traffic using forums” is just about that. A strong signature and the representation of your personal brand is driving traffic (not to mention the linkbuilding :wink: )

Anyway, there’s an advice: “Write top 10 lists!” - Josh Klein’s article is a typical example for that.

I pointed this out many times… Forum posting is the best direct advertising method… Better than PPC for it’s free.

Well, this article doesn’t say anything about traffic driving that I didn’t knew already, however the sample forum topic you gave is a good one. I’m not participating on SitePoint’s forums enough (I don’t have enough time), and when I do, I’m in the techy parts rather than the business parts.

So, the advise on ‘Start with a “free” promotion, list the non-promotion price, engage your first customers with the promotion’ I think is a great way to evaluate the quality of a product or service without creating a negative PR on yourself should the quality of your product/service turns out to be bad.

I mean, when you create a payed product/service, people expect quality, and when they don’t get it, they stop using it, and advise everyone to stay away from it. When it’s free (promotionally or not), they instead try it (since they won’t loose anything), and if they don’t like it, they say to frinds “Well… I didn’t really liked it, but try it if you want… it’s free after all”.

Good pointers, I agree and also think that most web site promoters, not to be confused with heavy metal band promoters, discount good forum traffic.

There is definitely a spammy way to do anything, and I’m glad you pointed out some differences. I’ve read way too many forums lately that seems to have a bunch of similar responses to a new forum thread that seem like one person saying the same thing 50 different ways.

You do have good content on your site though which really helps to keep visitors (rare), plus you use Grid Focus (I’m pretty sure) which is my favorite theme.

Good advice, even for an NGO blog admin, which is one of my responsibilities.
Advice # 7 and 9, I’ll be using with my English students as well. :wink:

There are many .edu and .gov forums which can be also useful if you participate there.

Are search engines have special attention in domain with .edu and .gov extension?

I got my traffics mostly from SEs, particularly on image searches; then follow by forums; then the rest came from squidoo pages i made.

Yes special attention in domain with .edu and .gov extension

forums are full of knowledgeable webmasters that will surely help you with your site or blog problems. another thing is the backlinks you get every time you post a reply or a new topic.

I chose relying on organic results from SERPs, it’s one of the best way to drive traffic. Rankings.

I find forums a place where I can share ideas and get help from folks in similar business.

Me too, Me too.

Honestly though - forums really can be a great way to drive targeted traffic. The issue is that you actually need to be involved yourself. Useful and insightful thoughts can be hard to string together for some forum posters (as is evident by the way this thread has trailed off in the last few posts…) But if you actually add something useful to the post, you can almost always expect a good return on your forum investment :wink:

There are lots of ways, besides forums, to get backlinks. Many, if not most of us, I think, use forums to learn and gain new insights that will help our businesses.