2 March 2008 10 Comments

In the recent times, more and more blogging-oriented forums have evolved along with the evolution of blogs and forms of blogging. Just as we have been using the various social networks (blogging) to our benefit, we can make the best use of such forums to bring maximum traffic to your blog.

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.