Traffic Building 101: Online Forums

Traffic is one of the most important things for a website owner to consider when it comes to getting the best out of their site. It is vitally important to have good content, for sure, but if no-one ever sees it then your content can be as good or as bad as you like and it won’t matter. So it is important to attract traffic, and one way of doing this is by promoting your site on forums.

It should be noted that promoting your site needs to be done in the right way in order to be as effective as you would wish it to be. There is no benefit in just placing a link in every post. Unless you give it context and show people why they should be visiting the site this will be tagged as spam pretty quickly, your post may be deleted and you can be banned from using the forum.

The first place you should put a link is in your signature. When you sign up for a forum it is important to set up your profile, and part of this involves creating a signature for your posts. This will appear beneath all posts on most forums, and below your first post on each page of a thread on others. If people like your posts, they will click that link.

This means that you need to be a good contributor to forums. If you are discussing a topic, you can demonstrate knowledge and improve people’s perception of you as a poster and a thinker. If you can find a good reason to include a link in your post (to support an argument or demonstrate a scenario) then so much the better.