Using forums to promote a blog

Many people ask me, how do you promote a blog? Well, a blog is a website, so you promote a blog as you would any other site. But since blogs tend to be more personal and informal than typical websites, traditional techniques used to promote, say an e-commerce site, are equally effective for blogs.

First your blog should focus on a particular topic matter. Some people like to use their blogs to write about whatever comes to mind or rant about the 1001 injustices that life throws in their ways. Even if your blog falls into this category, chances are, there will a recurrent theme that surfaces over and over, and that theme would be your topic.

Once you’ve decided what your blog is about, go to Google.com and search for popular forums on your general topic. You should get a bunch of results. Pick only a handful– not more than five– of the most popular forums to join.

But before joining make sure the forum allows you to have signatures linking to your site. This is the least they can do for you for the time that you will put into to help add content to the forum.

It’s important that the forums you join are popular because you don’t want to waste your time contributing to ones that no one reads.

After you join the forums, become active on them. Use them to raise questions, answer questions, give advices, debate issues, and so on and so forth. But be sure to include a signature pointing to your blog.

Your signatures helps to promote your blog in two ways: (1) by helping to build links to your site and (2) by drawing direct visitors from people reading your message. Therefore, it’s important that you have something interesting to write because if people like what you have to say on the threads, they’ll check out your link to see what else you have to offer. Writing one-line responses simply to get links is not recommended since you risk getting flamed by other members and appearing like a village idiot.

As I’ve mentioned earlier blogs tend to be more personal and informal than other websites. Since forum exchanges share these traits, they complement each other very well. I’ve often come up with blog topics by reading the forums and vice versa.

Another point to keep in mind is that your fellow members on the forums are your peers. It’s important to avoid writing in a way that is condescending or even pedantic to your readers. Instead, write in peer-to-peer rather than a teacher-to-student perspective. This is true for both forum participation and blog entries.