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Business & Marketing John Ritskowitz on 20 Apr 2008 01:40 pm
The Power of Forums
A lot of people think posting to forums is a waste of time. It CAN be, if you’re there just to chat or kill time. But forums represent a tremendous opportunity on many fronts if you use them correctly.
Now I’m not going to talk about marketing your products and services through forums. Not exactly. It’s been discussed many times before by people a lot smarter than me. But I will talk about something that anyone who chooses to sell through a forum outlet will want to know.
I recently gave some tips on a well-known marketing forum in response to the post of a forum owner. He wanted to know how to get his forum posts ranked higher in the search engines (SEs), and thus wanted more relevant traffic through his own forum.
An understandable goal.
He got some good advice, including getting backlinks to many of the individual posts on his forum.
But what WASN’T mentioned was HOW to get some of those backlinks. Aside from linking to forum threads from your own sites, how do you get other people to link to them? Because that’s what you really need to be successful.
So I offered some tips based on what has worked for me. I run many forums outside the marketing niches, including one for the telecom/call center niche. So let’s take that one as an example.
But the bottom line is, if you run a forum, you need to get topics that people outside the forum will link to on their own.
The usual viral topics will often work: controversy, funny, incredibly useful, you know the drill.
Even if you have to pay people to regularly post content (or do it yourself).
A good way to get started is to see which threads people are linking to on similar forums.
You need to do this with all the major SE’s, not just Google, because Google keeps many of it’s backlinks hidden from their search results.
So let’s take my telecom forum as an example. I might start at Google and do a search on all of my keywords (and add the word “forum” or “discussion board” to the search). That’ll get me a list of competing forums.
I might search for:
- call center forum
- telecommunications forum
- telecom discussion board
Stuff like that.
Then I’ll visit the ones with the greater rankings, since they’re usually the ones that have been vetted and stood the test of time (most forums don’t last very long). Then I’ll make a list of all the forums that look promising and have lots of REGULAR content (i.e. both old and new, CONSISTENTLY).
Finally, I’ll go to the advance search in Google and check the backlinks leading into each of these. Like I said, Google doesn’t reveal as many backlinks as, say, Yahoo does, so you’ll need to hit up Yahoo and MSN, at a minimum, in addition to Google.
Now you’ll have a sense of what kinds of threads in your industry generate external backlinks. You want more threads like those in your own forum, and you need to be able to spread the word about them.
I’ll talk more about this again but I thought this may help some of you who either have forums or are considering starting one. Not only do I own several forums, I’m a moderator in a few that you probably already visit.
And even if you don’t own a forum, those same tactics can get more external links to YOUR threads and postings on any forum you visit. The trick is to post something people will want to link to.
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on 20 Apr 2008 at 2:15 pm 1.Jason Anderson said …
Hi John,
Yes, solid advice there. Since I run a “support” forum I’ll try that out. Even though it’s technically a support forum for my software membership site…it wouldn’t hurt getting lurkers there who may be interested in the software due to the conversations that happen there.
As long as we are on the subject of forums (and since you have experience in this arena) I’d like to know how you combat forum SPAM which seems to be a bigger issue.
I’ve recruited 4 forum members to be moderators and delete the junk and I’ve resorted to approving all new members first. I run a PhpBB forum…
Any suggestions? Maybe you could make a blog post about that in the future.
on 20 Apr 2008 at 2:45 pm 2.John Ritskowitz said …
Hi, Jason.
Spam is always a problem with forums. There’s generally 2 ways I handle that.
1) Have a good moderator team that logs in regularly and polices it. Sounds like you’re doing that now.
2) Use anti-spam mods and addins, like captcha and the math mods. Even with double opt-in confirmations of new users, people unfortunately still do that so they can set up their spam automation software.
My forums use Snitz (for Windows servers) and SMF (for LAMP platforms), so I’m familiar and experienced with the mods for those. I played around with phpBB a few times, but I never got to the point where I installed any mods.
So I confess I’m not as experienced from the admin side of phpBB as the others when it comes to mods, but I’ve certainly USED many phpBB boards as a poster/user.
But I know they all have similar anti-spam mods. Blog mods like Akismet would be ideal for forums, because then we only have to worry about the non-automated submissions, which almost always require human intervention to keep at bay!
on 20 Apr 2008 at 3:23 pm 3.Lisa Preston said …
Hey, John! Great post!
As you know, at http://ablakeforum.com we tackled the spam issue using a couple of those techniques… we use captchas, double opt-in, and vigorous moderation by the admins as well as expert moderators.
We also ban spammers who do get through within minutes of their postings. Seems like such a waste of their time, doesn’t it? Once they post a spam message, their account is banned by username, IP address and email. They are doing it manually, so I’m not sure what they see is the payoff.
As for backlinks…
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. I think posting topical, relevant material with lively discussions is the perfect way to get backlinks. I don’t know of any other forums in our niche who utilize video, social media and other “new” technologies to bring subscribers, but i do know that we are growing at an astonishing rate! Our list of backlinks is inspiring, after only a month - and helps us to know we’re on the right track.
Cheers!
Lisa
on 21 Apr 2008 at 2:47 pm 4.John Ritskowitz said …
Thanks for the comment, Lisa. Yes, Tony’s forum is a great place with lots of good content just itching for backlinks.
You’ve done a great job in putting that together with the design, etc.!
John
on 22 Apr 2008 at 5:30 pm 5.Shel Horowitz said …
John, I’ve been singing the praises of some sort of interactive marketing since 1991. I’ve generally used e-mail, more than web or BBS forums, because I can get the posts as a digest and hit print.
These days, despite the eyestrain, I’m shifting more in the direction of groups hosted on Facebook and other social network sites.
–>This has been the *cornerstone* of my own business for 13 years.
Shel Horowitz, author of Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and six other books.
on 30 Apr 2008 at 2:43 pm 6.Tina SEO Kelly said …
John,
You’re absolutely correct about “something others would want to link to”
I posted a response in a forum and was dumbfounded when I saw it coming up on the first page of Google.
Until then I didn’t even know Google was crawling forums.
I was looking up the same subject as I posted several months later and couldn’t believe it!
Of course some of the best info is in private (paid for) forums. And most always the owners keep the spiders out of them.
Anyway, great post! -Tina
on 09 May 2008 at 9:13 am 7.Judy Kettenhofen said …
I remember a well-known internet marketer came on the Warrior Forum looking for moderation help because one of his forums was getting a lot of spam.
I volunteered — noticed that one of the forums didn’t have a captcha on it, and let him know. He installed the captcha, and his spam problems disappeared.
BTW — if people are interested in putting up a forum — and shied away because of information about phpbb — should really check out phpbb3. PhpBB3 actually paid to have a security audit done on it. As of the last time I checked, it is the only free forum software to have done so.
I’d also encourage folks who have a phpbb2 forum to upgrade to phpbb3