Participating on internet discussion forums in your niche can be a valuable tool for marketing your blog. Unfortunately, many bloggers take this approach too literally and come across way too strong in their efforts to promote themselves. For those who understand the philosophy in social media (being part of the conversation and not a megaphone), the rules for interaction on forums isn’t much different at all. It’s about building trust over a period of time, sharing useful information and contributing with well thought out responses that inspire others to participate in the discussion.
“But how then do I become part of the elite clique right away and get known throughout the community?”
If you want a quicker path to success – one sure fire way to get noticed is by promoting your blog seemingly every other thread regardless of the context or relevance of the topic at hand. This is especially true if all you do is post blog links and nothing else. Oh, and make sure to have a signature that scrolls for 800 pixels and can cause a blind bat seizures. I guarantee you within a week, you’ll be the talk of the town. Sure, they’ll all be making fun of you, using your name as a verb in replacement of the word “spam” – but isn’t that what the end-goal is in branding? like Xerox or Google!
“A whole week? Isn’t there anything I can do to get tons of people to my super awesome blog within a day?”
Absolutely. This is exactly why private message systems on forums were invented – so you can talk to members behind the administrator’s back (that no-good spam nazi!) and convince them your blog is so much more worthy of their time than this boring website. My only suggestion is to prepare a comeback for when the moderators see that your PM box takes up 1.3 gigabytes of space after sending everyone your exclusive one-of-a-kind eBook. Don’t worry, just tell them you pressed the wrong button by accident… 284 times.
“That still seems so time-consuming… any one-post wonder type solutions?”
Yes, of course. I should have told you this from the beginning. It just takes four words in your blog link’s anchor text:
Megan. Fox. Naked. Photos. ‘Nuff said.