You’ve probably heard about Article Marketing and Forum Marketing. In fact, you may even be sick of hearing about it. But are you doing it? The reason that you hear so much about these two marketing techniques is that they work!
Yes, article marketing and forum marketing builds traffic slowly. There are faster ways to get traffic. But, when you build traffic using these methods as well, you are also building your credibility. You are drawing responsive people to your site, and if your site is doing its job as well, and you get those people on your list, you can draw them back time and time again.
Note: If you are not collecting email addresses at your website, the traffic that you bring there is essentially wasted. By building an opt-in list, you can bring traffic back to your site over and over again, and this is essential to online businesses. Email addresses and first names should be collected with an opt-in page, or with subscribe boxes located on every single page of your website!
Now, let’s start generating some traffic with articles. The concept is that you write an article, which should be anywhere from 350 to 750 words in length. You include an author’s resource box at the bottom of your article, and your website link is included in that resource box. You submit the article to article directories and ezine publishers.
If you can’t write, you can get article written for less than $10 each by a ghostwriter. If you don’t have the time it takes to submit articles, you can hire a service to do that for you as well. It is essential that you do article marketing, because it is viral. Your articles will be used on other people’s websites, blogs, and in their ezines – spreading the word about your site.
There are many tools that you can use to build, update, get traffic, and save presious time to all your web sites.
Forum marketing is also important. To do forum marketing, you find good, well populated forums that relate to your niche. You simply participate in those forums, and include a signature file at the bottom of all of your posts, that lead people to your website. Forum marketing does not take much time at all, once you’ve found the forums that you want to participate in.
Again, these are slow, but effective (and free) ways to generate traffic. But no matter how slow they are, they are essential to your overall online business because of the virility of these techniques, and the credibility that it gives you.
Homework Assignment: Write and submit one article, each week. Participate in your niche forums on a daily basis, posting one message in each forum per day, using a signature file that brings people to your website.