Joining the Forums:

Joining any forums is as easy as A-B-C! Simply look for the register or the sign up button which is generally located in easy reach along with the other navigation buttons like the Home, etc. When you click on the register or the sign up button, you are taken to the account registration form where you can fill in your personal details for registering an account, and choose a user name and a password.

However, if it was all this simple, what is the point of discussing “Joining the Forums” in such detail that it requires a whole article for itself? Actually, it is not the process of signing up that is of a great importance, enough to reserve a whole article for itself but the things you must keep in mind before you decide to join any forums.

What are these? Let us now see.

• Read the Terms and Conditions of Usage, carefully, before you sign up. Reading through the Terms and Conditions is not a waste of time! The terms and conditions is actually a compilation of guidelines which you agree to follow as code of conduct when participating in the forums. Any violation can lead to a negative reputation or even a ban from participation.One such often overlooked part of ToS (Terms of Service) is regarding receiving notifications and updates about the forums from the administrators and moderators. When you sign up, you agree to receive notifications and updates via mass email. However, I have seen many people complaining about these mails in the forums! Well, if you’re not comfortable with this feature, you shouldn’t join any forums though most of the forums provide an option to control notifications via mass email through the admin-panel.
• The first thing you should do after signing up is to manage your profile. You can enter your personal details like your name, location, contact information and website address in there so that it’s visible to other members. This gives your website more exposure at every step of your activity in the forums.You can also add a signature, which can be defined as a space appended to the end of every post you make in the forums which can contain short pieces of text, and sometimes even images and website addresses. Yet another step towards blog promotion and marketing. We’ll discuss it in a future article in this series.
• The next thing you should do before you post your first thread is to go and read the Forum Rules and Regulations. The name says what they are all about. They are as important as the Terms and Conditions which we discussed above. Any violation, again, can lead to negative reputation and/or a ban! This can negatively affect your blog promotion and marketing movement, so avoid indulging in any kind of unwelcome activity at the forums.
• With that being said and done, you are ready to make your first post. What should your first post be about?The best idea for making your first post in the forums is to Introduce Yourself. When you sign up for any forums, the forum members including the moderators and administrators want you to tell them a bit about yourself so they get familiar with you. Introducing yourself helps you get into a friendly and somewhat informal relationship with the rest and makes it easier for you to convey yourself through the discussion threads by making you easy with other members and vice versa!

With this, you are ready to rock ‘n’ roll with your blog promotion and marketing campaign using forums. In the next article in this series (How to use Forums to Build Blog Traffic) we will learn how to introduce yourself in the forums and use your introduction to build some traffic for your blog and along with that learn the basics ethics of participation in the forums.

Leave a comment and share your opinions about using forums to increase blog traffic by effective blog promotion and marketing. It’d be lovely to hear some tips and ideas from your side.

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This week I am going to publish a series of articles that will focus on How to Make the Best Use of Forums to promote and market your blog. We’ll learn, step by step, how to boost our traffic and the reader count using these blogging-oriented forums in the best way we can. These forums were set up for a purpose; the purpose of helping the blogging community. Every day, thousands of blogs are created and thousands taken down out of the frustration of not making it big in the blogosphere.

You’ll all agree that many of these bloggers had great knowledge or were good writers or good entertainers. But they could not market and promote their blogs in a way they should have done. By the way, are you working efficiently to survive in this battle? Are you using these blogging-oriented forums for increasing traffic to your blog?

Well, let us now get started with the first article in the series,

Choosing The Right Forums:

The very first Step towards using the forums to your benefit is to chose one forum (or a few, depending on the time you can invest) to participate in. You have to be very wise while choosing a forum to promote and market your blog because your time is precious. It’s better to utilize your time to engage in more productive activities rather than wasting it in an unproductive forum!

So, choosing the right forum for your blog is important and in fact, just this process of making a choice will result in gradual increments in your blog statistics. Let us see, how, with these few ways to help you make the right choice:

Search and Research: Do a Google search to find forums specific to your niche. For example, for finding a suitable forum for Inspirit, I would Google for terms like “Blogging Forums” or “Meta-Blogging forums” or “Personal Blog Forums” or “Forums Blog Promotion” etc.  Generally, the forums that are listed on the top of the search results will be good enough considering that they occupy the top position in Search Engine but this is not always necessary.

News-On-The-Net had this list of 10 forums to help you become a better blogger that I had bookmarked a few months ago. I have been using a forum or two to promote my blog out of this list and it really helps.

So, what to do next?

Read through the forums that you come across from the search results. Instead of reading each and everything carefully, try to look for articles or discussions that are specifically related to your blog and can possibly help you in optimizing and promoting your blog. If you are a good learner, you’ll learn from reading these discussions just as you would learn from reading a blog. Try implementing the positive part of what you read and avoid the negative points.

Review the Content:
References: Some of the discussions or articles that you can look for are references to good articles from other similar blogs. One thing that I particularly dislike about some of the really good forums is that the administrators and moderators sometimes term such references as Shameless Blog Promotion, which generally happens when these references are to blog entries from the blog of the submitter itself. I think rather than terming it as shameless linking and boing-boing promotion, administrators and moderators should review these articles and let them stay if they are beneficial to the community.

However, members should also take care that this is not the only thing they do when participating. Call this the moral science of participation in forums; we’ll talk about this in a later post in this series, however.

Original Content: Another indication of a forum being good is original articles that are not taken from other blogs but are specifically shared on the forums. This is a sign of extending self-less help to the forum members and should be appreciated and respected.

Review the Tone of Members: Take a few minutes to run an eye over the replies posted by the community members. Are they helpful? Do they respond genuinely? Are they meaningful? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself when reviewing the tone of forum members. If flaming and trolling is all that the forum members are doing, do not expect such a forum to help you in promoting your blog. You won’t be read by anyone who follows a discussion in which flaming takes place against the ideas you try to convey.

Well, I think this is good enough for today. In the next post, we will talk about joining the forums and taking the first steps towards positive participation. Stay tuned to this series on How to use forums for increasing traffic to your blog.