Article 4-Blogging For Profit: How To Use Forums To Drive Laser-Targeted Readers To Your Blog

This is the fourth article in a series of "Blogging For Profit". Today, I am going to discuss how to use forums to drive laser-targeted readers (and ultimately buyers) to your blog.

Blogging techniques are all a part of a puzzle. The parts fit together to form a campaign to drive readers to your blog. As we have been discussing, the first thing that a new blogger needs to do is pick out a very targeted niche to write about, preferably one that he or she knows a lot about. Besides the fact that it will make it easier to write daily about, it is also important for our next step...forum posting.


You might be asking why use forums to promote your blog? Here are just a few reasons:

1. Because of the nature of forums, they offer a very targeted, laser guided group of readers for your blog.

2. They have literally thousands of dedicated members, all with very similar interests.

3. Forums offer a community value. The inherent value of communities is obvious. If you have ever been involved in any small group (like a high school, or college community, your church, etc.) you understand immediately the value of the community.

4. Finally, forums are indexed as authority sites by the various search engines. We have not talked about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as it is a topic that whole e-books are written about. Suffice to say, it is important and forums help you get your blog indexed.

Finding Forums:

There are two things you need to find out about the forum you are looking at to decide if it is a viable prospect for you to post in.

1. They have to allow links back to your blog.

2. They need to have 3-5 thousand members.

Now the question becomes, how do I find a forum? Here are two possible sources:

www.big-boards.com
www.forumurl.com

Posting:

After you find a forum that fits the criteria outlined above, you need to sign up to be able to participate in the posting of comments in the forum. You need to pick a name to post under. I would consider using the name or title of your blog. Be sure the set up a link back to your blog. Depending on the niche you have picked out, you might consider posting something a little controversial. Usually people in forums have very specific views about the niche that they are in. As an example, if you have chosen a niche about guitars, ask something like, "I am considering purchasing a Gibson guitar. Does anyone have an opinion?" I promise you that everyone in a guitar forum would have a strong opinion and you would get a lot of responses (and clicks) back your blog.

These are just a few ideas about using forums to drive traffic to your blog. My next article will have more ideas about how to drive free traffic to your blog. Until then, here's to living the dream.


Ron Lewis searches for products that require little, if any, start up money so almost anyone can begin an online business with very little "out of pocket" money.

Web site: The Affiliate-Code.

Blog: The Affiliate-Code/BlogSpot.

Ron is also an Ezine Expert Author: Click Here! to read his other articles.