Forums and Discussion Boards have lot of potential and can send a lot of traffic to your website.

However, many website owners just don’t understand the value of forums and simply ignore them.

In this article, I will discuss how you can drive traffic to your website easily using forums.

What Do You Want To Spend: Time Or Money?

You can either participate in forums yourself or hire freelancers to do so.

If you participate yourself, you will have full control over your brand image and it does not cost anything but time.

However, if you are short on time, it is best to hire others to do forum posting for you. Make sure that you hire only people with proven track record of such tasks (forum posting, promotion) because one wrong post can ruin your brand image and make your product look spammy!

How To Drive Traffic!

Here are 7 tips that will help you to drive traffic from forums:

1. Choose Forum(s) Carefully: First step is to do some research for finding forums related to your field. Use search engines to find good forums and also ask your friends. After that, join the best ones that already have lot of active members.
2. Do Not Promote, Participate First: Your first post on any forum should not be “Hi! I have launched a new product” or “Hi! here’s my new site”, first participate in discussions, answer other people’s queries and make friends. It is best not to promote anything until you reach 50 posts.
3. Include Links To Your Website In Signatures: Signatures are a great way to get traffic. In fact, it should be one of the first things you do after joining a forum. Do not forget to check “Include My Signature” when replying to any questions.
4. Try To Be First One To Reply: If you know answer to a question, try to be first one to reply. If your answer helps people, they will surely visit your website.
5. Write Tutorials/Long posts Once In A While: Tutorials and long posts tend to be more effective in driving traffic from forums. You can write a tutorial or long article about your niche and then include a link to your website in the end.
6. Offer Freebies/Special Discounts: To get even more traffic, you can offer freebies or special discounts on your product(s) to forum members only.
7. Be Friends With Administrators And Mods: Find the owners and moderators and try to be friendly with them. This will help you in long term. I have seen many forums where admins themselves happily make promotional posts for valuable members. People generally trust administrators and moderators more and this means that you can get a lot more traffic!

So, in summary, using the above 7 methods, you can drive a lot of traffic from any forum to your site. Try these methods today it won’t be long before you will see the effect.