restauranteur natty: New Experiment: Forum Posting As A Traffic ...

Forums As Traffic Strategy There?s lots of ways you can generate traffic to a business website and small business entrepreneurs like you and I generally try lots of different things to get people to visit our sites.

Today I wanted to let you know about an experiment I will be conducting to test one of these traffic sources.

The goal of this is to show you all, very transparently, how to conduct, track and measure different traffic generation strategies and see whether they?re leading to new leads.

The Traffic Experiment

The plan is actually to conduct several of these little traffic experiments over the second half of this year.

We?re going to be reporting the results on the blog and in our newsletter, so if you?re not subscribed already please do so by entering your name and email in the sidebar or at the end of this post.

This first experiment is: to test the viability of forum participation as a traffic source.

Forums ? they?re as old as the internet, but do they still work?

Many people swear by using forums as a way to talk to and engage with your business community.

I?ve had some moderate success with forums in the past by participating in forums based around the tools we use in our business, but it?s been a long time since I?ve done this sort of thing and I have a laundry list of reservations. Is the time commitment going to be too much? What the quality of the traffic will be like and will it convert?

Here is a short list of assumptions I?d like to validate:

I have a feeling participating in forums will take up a lot of time and I?m not sure it?s worth it to my business.
Forums are as old as the internet, but do they still generate decent traffic?
Will the quality of traffic be good enough? I?d like to see some of that traffic turn into usable business leads.

Although one of the forums I?ll be using I have an account with already I?ve only made one post there about a year ago. I?m pretty much starting fresh.

I think that the results over the next 30 days will be a pretty good indication of what it would be like to use this strategy to generate traffic to a brand new site so if you?re just new to this online marketing thing you?ll want to come back and check out the results.

At the end of July I?d like hit a couple of key metrics that I consider would make this experiment a success:

Total forum posts: 100 (this includes replying to other people?s topics)
Total visits to the website directly from forums: 300
Total new leads from forums (tracked as contact form submissions): 1
Total new email subscribers from forums: 9

I?m writing this on the 5th of July, so I?ll tell you that I have already signed up to one forum (Flying Solo) and started posting. I?m up to 12 posts there already. I also signed up for another forum today (AussieTycoon) and I?m just waiting to be approved on that one so I can start participating.

Picking Your Niche Forums Correctly

It?s important if you?re doing a similar experiment that you pick the right forums to participate in.

For me, my primary customers are other business people, which typically includes solo founders, small partnerships and businesses with a small number of employees (although some are quite a bit bigger).

This means for me a smart place to look for prospects is on forums where those people might be looking for advice about websites and online marketing (two things I offer).

There are forums out there for just about any niche. My advice is to do a search based around your main niche and add ?forum? to the end of it, ie. ?plumbing forum?.

You will find a handful of forums in just about any niche. If you don?t, try expanding your search.

For example, a plumber could also participate in home renovation forums (and in fact that might even be a better fit come to think of it).

How To Drive Traffic Back To Your Site

There?s two options really for driving traffic back to the site:

Mention your blog posts and link back to your website inside of the posts you make
Setup a signature with a link to your site

For me I am going the signature route with something like this:

?Hi, I?m Josh Kohlbach, the founder of Rymera Web Co, a web development company based in Brisbane.?

The reason I prefer the signature option is because it sounds too much like self promotion when you?re dropping links in the content of your forum posts. I?d hate to get banned because it would basically write off the experiment.

That?s not to say the first option isn?t viable, but it?s probably something you want to do only occasionally.

Releasing The Results

I?m going to be completely transparent about this so at the end of it you?ll get some nice pretty graphs and statistics along with some lessons learned.

I?ll also keep you updated on the experiment as we?re going through July, but the goal is to do a big write up on this in early August once all the traffic numbers are in.

To be perfectly honest, I?m not too concerned if I don?t get any leads from this which is why I?m targeting a measly 1 new lead.

The reason for this is that all the effort I will put into posting now will come back to me for many months to come.

I think it?s more likely that someone will find me via a forum post that is 6 months old after it?s been indexed in the search engines properly and decide to make contact then.

Anyhow, wish me luck!

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