Is Forum Marketing Worth Your Time?

There are a number of people who wonder if they should even bother with the concept of creating more free website traffic with forums. You are about to see that it depends on your niche market. I'm going to teach you a few simple steps that you can take that allow you to see if this free traffic generation technique is going to be worth your time.

What to do first: If you want to know if it will be worth your time to participate in forums, you will need to see what your forum options are, and if you find that there are few forums on your niche market, then that may be an opportunity for you to create a large amount of traffic by creating your own forum.

Once you have seen what forums are available to you, you will then want to pick the forums that have Google Page rankings. The way to learn the page rank of any website that you are visiting is by installing the Google Toolbar on your internet browser. You then go into the options for the Google Toolbar and then click on the option that allows you to see the page ranks of these websites. Generally, it is rather hard to get a Google page ranking for any website, so if you see any forum with a page rank of 1 or better, then you may want to consider posting to that forum.

Now, if you find forums that have page ranks of 4 or better, and if those forums allow you to put your website name in your signature and at the end of your comments, then you have just hit a jackpot. If I found a forum with these qualifications, I would become a regular participant in that forum, and the reason is because once you can create links on that high ranking website that point back to your website, that allows you to manually increase the "importance" of your own site.

The search engines like to see links to your website from other high ranking websites, and this can increase the popularity of your own website on the search engines. But chances are, if there is a forum with page ranks of 4 or better, they are likely going to have a no tolerance approach to spam. This would mean that you would need to be very careful about placing links to your own websites on these forums, but if you do things right and really participate in these forums, then it will likely be viewed as o.k. for you to occasionally mention one of your websites. Just use proper etiquette!

So, as you can see, I view the forum's page rank as the most important factor in deciding if I will participate in that forum for free traffic. The reason why I take this approach is because if a forum has a page rank, it likely has a good amount of participates and forum visitors. Also, good page rankings means that most of the forum's discussions probably are getting indexed and ranked in the search engines, so the more discussions you participate in, the more chances you have of having people read your comments and possibly visiting your own website.

Now, is posting to forums going to be worth your time? Well, if you need to create some quality links to your website, then it will be a great idea. Also, if you are looking for an extra spike in website traffic, there are possibilities for doing so, but these extra incoming links and extra traffic will only happen if you find some great forums to participate in within your niche.