Why You Should Use (Not Abuse) Forums toIncrease Your Traffic

There are dozens of reasons why you should look up the forums that are related to yourmarket and post to them often. Here are 3 to get you started.

1- Get to Know Your Market as both an Associate and An Expert

The research alone is a good enough reason to at least sign up to some forums and read.Just by reading posts in forums, you can hear what your market concerns are, straight fromconsumers. You'll be able to find what their pains are - look particularly for frequentquestions that don't appear to have solutions.

For example, if you sell timeshares, and you join travel communities, you may often hearquestions asking for the best times of year to visit a certain region or locale. With thisinformation you could start a section at your site for every listing that tells the cheapesttime to travel for that area, the best time of year for good weather, and other special bits ofinformation a traveler might want.

When you're comfortable enough to begin posting, after watching the conversation for a fewdays, or perhaps even a week, you might find that new people have questions that you canhelp them with. By consistently becoming the go-to person, you increase your credibility asa knowledgeable expert, and people begin to trust your ability to provide information.

2- Increase Your Site's Visibility With More Targeted Links Back to Your Site

Many forums are run by hobbyists who aren't so much concerned with marking money fromtheir visitors, as having an established community for discourse on certain issues. Theseforums will often allow you to leave a link to your site in every post. The ones that are opento public viewing for visitors are also frequently spidered by search engines.

If you set up your link correctly, you'll then have topical links back to your own forum. Evenif the search engine spiders can't see these links at forums that can be viewed by registeredusers only, you will also find that once you become a part of the community, othermembers will click your link out of curiosity or because they're looking for somethingspecific that you may have at your site.

Even forums that exist to gain more sales of their own products often allow you to post yourlink, especially if it isn't to a competing site. For example, internet marketing forums run bypeople who sell do-it-yourself SEO products may allow infopreneurs who sell a different typeof product, such as an autoresponder service, to post their link freely.

The focus here, at all times, is to help other members, not just to promote your product.Your link is in your signature, so unless someone asks you a specific question, you get farbetter results from being helpful than you do by posting forum spam that gets deletedanyway.

3- Lurk, Listen and Learn

If you've been around forums at all, you already know that there are often 8 to ten timesmore people registered and not posting than there are people who actually visit andparticipate.

Reading without ever posting is commonly known as "lurking". I usually suggest that atleast for the first week, you should monitor the community you wish to join in this way, justreading posts, and learning the personality of the forum you'd like to post in - this keepsyou from committing any faux pas that might have you corrected by another member, oreven worse, banned.

Sometimes you'll find a forum that is appropriate to read, but doesn't seem like the rightplace for commercial posting. Or you might find that you're there to learn and not to teach -or maybe you just don't have the time to post as you'd like to. You can still learn a lot bybeing a lurker.

When lurking in forums, your primary job is to listen (figuratively speaking) and learn.Again, pay attention to questions that come up repeatedly over the course of a month or so.Be on the look out for rumored product or technology developments. Find out who is theresident expert - maybe this is the key person for an interview you want to do, or anaffiliate program you can join.

The most important thing you can learn from this exercise is what annoyances your marketis experiencing. If you sell cat furniture, and you find out that a common complaint isavailability in remote markets, maybe you can change your shipping policy to addinternational ordering and increase the scope of your business.

Anywhere you can fit a solution to a problem can bring you the sales you need. You mayfind out that you need to change your product, to enhance it, or perhaps to take outfeatures your prospects just aren't interested in.

This is a good solution when you have the time to visit forums and post or read. As youbecome more busy, you'll find yourself at the forums less and less as a poster, so this isn'tnecessarily a permanent solution. However, if you follow these steps correctly, you'll soonhave the traffic to foster more community relations at your own site as well.

Tinu is a website promotion specialist who posts free information on a variety of traffic tipsin her blog at http://www.freetraffictip.com .