Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Brian Dean from Quick Sprout and in this video, I’m going to show you how you can drive targeted traffic to your site using forum marketing and, in my opinion, forum marketing is one of the most underrated traffic strategies online.
Let me show you what I mean. You can see in my Google Analytics here that we’re looking at referral traffic for the month of May, which is a month where I did quite a bit of forum marketing and as you can see, in the top ten of my referral traffic sources, Warrior Forum is number three. It brought me 387 visitors. In a different internet marketing forum, trafficplanet.com, brought me 121 targeted visitors.
Now, I’m going to teach you how you can do the same thing for your site, no matter what niche you’re in. The first step is to find forums in your niche that are active. This is the best search string you can probably use. You want to use your keyword in quotes plus forum.
Depending on your niche, sometimes this search string works really well, sometimes not so much, so I’m going to show you some other ones. This one obviously will bring up a ton of forum results. You can also use this search string, which is your keyword plus Powered by vBulletin and vBulletin is a forum software that a of people use for creating and managing forums. As you can see, this forum here, if you scroll to the bottom you can see it says “Powered by vBulletin”.
OK? This is a very common search string that you can use to find tons and tons of forums in almost any niche. You can also use this one, which is, baking plus this in quotes hot thread with new post, and this is another search string that a lot of forums tend to use at the bottom of their home page to show you which threads you want to check out.
These are three really, really good search strings and you can usually find plenty of forums in your niche, but if these aren’t bringing you enough results or you just want more, there’s another trick you can do to find more forums. What you want to do is, put in a niche specific keyword, so this is something only people in your niche would probably searching for.
If you’re in the baking niche, you don’t want to put something like baking or baking cookies, you want to put something very specific, so in this case, almond flour baking. Then, here you want to click more and then choose discussions from the list and that brings up a list of forums and posts a lot of blog comments, but mostly forums. As you can see, we have [??] which is a Q&A site and some other forums are going to be listed here. This is another thing you can use, so if you’re in internet marketing or SEO, you wouldn’t want to put SEO, you’d want to put something like link building and choose discussions.
Once you’ve found a forum, you want to see if it’s even worth your time. The first thing you want to do is look at the latest post info and look at when the last post was posted. Basically, what you’re doing is seeing how often people are posting on this site and how active it is, because there is no way to see how many active users there are, so this is a proxy way to do that. Under posted you want to look at the date and in that case that is yesterday, so that’s pretty recent. This is also from yesterday, which is pretty recent. As long as you see that, it’s probably worth making an account.
Your next step is to register. Find wherever it says register, click that button. Then, you want to fill out the user name or screen name, depending on how they phrase it on that particular forum, very carefully. You want to make it your brand name or your personal name. If you’re Neil, you want to do something like Quick Sprout. You wouldn’t want to put something like Neil 1987, like that. You want something very memorable and branded. Ideally, you’d put your brand name or your site name as your username. That’s important because people are going to be seeing that and associating your content on the forum with your brand. If thi
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