Free Traffic Tips

So now you know why forums are a treasure trove of information and potential prospects. But where do you find them?

A basic search for the desired topic and the word forums, will often find you plenty of great forums. For instance, if you help independent artists create CDs for distribution, you might do a search for “poetry forums” or “indie forums”. I normally suggest that you start with the hobbyist groups – people spend fortunes on their hobbies and interests.

Sometimes the keyword you want might not yield the results you’re looking for – there may not be many “timeshare resale” forums, but there are dozens, maybe hundreds of travel forums.

With search engines and their related properties, here are some good places to start.

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

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 from consumers. You’ll be able to find what their pains are – look particularly for frequent questions that don’t appear to have solutions.

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

When you’re comfortalbe enough to begin posting, after watching the conversation for a few days, or perhaps even a week, you might find that new people have questions that you can help them with. By oonsistently becoming the go-to person, you increase your credibility as a knowledgeable person, and people begin to trust you.

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So I’m continuing the free traffic method series today. Oor focus today will be on posting to other online communities to research your market and draw traffic to your site.

Before I go into that though, I want to make it clear that I’m not talking about having your own forum in this space. There simply isn’t enough room to go into all the ways that you can use community at your own site, and do it properly, in order to draw more return traffic to your site.

In the Free Traffic Primer series I have coming up, you’ll be able to learn how to create a forum, when to create one, how to get people to start posting right away and what most people do wrong with their forum communities when first starting out.

There’s also a lot to be said about whether and why to have a high traffic forum – sometimes a high traffic community on your site is Not what you want to have, and you might be better off, and make more money, from a smaller community that is focused more towards support.

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Really quickly, I want to say hello and thanks to a few people who were kind enough to send good wishes while I was out sick. Hi to Queen, first of all and thank you for your warm wishes.

Free Read what she said here.

Thanks also to Rok, Dr. Mani, Rodney and M. Anthony. I’m still resting, I swear! Just some posting then straight back to bed… If I haven’t mentioned you it’s because I’m doing my support emails and going back to bed. But do know that I’m feeling the love.

The News

“Yahoo on Tuesday confirmed that it will start beta testing a new community service this month that will let users share blogs, photos, music and other content with their friends.

The ‘invitation-only’ beta test for the new service, called Yahoo 360, is scheduled to start March 29, said Paul Brody, senior director of community products at Yahoo Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif.”

Read more at PCMag.com.

My Own Wild Speculation and Theories

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Here’s a great chance to enhance your Google listings if you have a local address for your business. Remember to use lucrative keywords in your listing for best results.

“Google Local Business Center lets business owners add their company information to Google Local or, if it’s already there, edit it, says Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products.

By offering this free service, Google seeks to increase the number of listings in Google Local and keep information current. ‘We want to build the most comprehensive index of local business information available on the Web and potentially anywhere,’ Mayer says.”

Read more at PCWorld.com .

If you’ve read my articles on using Google’s API key to help increase your search rankings, you’ll be interested to know that the company is launching a new program that is a full-blown developer network, which will include a directory of these tools.

“Code for four debugging or optimization tools is available: CoreDumper, for creating core dumps of a running program without terminating it; Sparse Hashtable contains hash-map (define) implementations; Goopy/Functional, is a library for Python, the open-source object-oriented programming language; and Perftools can be used to make C++ applications more robust.”

Read the whole article at InternetNews.com.

“Microsoft launched MSN adCenter, an online advertising program, Wednesday, according to an announcement at MSN’s customer summit in Redmond, Washington. The new search products could throw down a serious challenge to search engine giants Google and Yahoo.”

Read the whole article at PhysOrg.com.