Comments on: How NOT to promote your website on forums

By: JeffCasmer

JeffCasmer — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:13:30 +0000

Lori,

Your right on. Very few people go to the section in the forum where you can “post your free add” unless your posting your free ad. No one reads those. Engage in some real conversation and good things come back to you in the form of branding and clicks in your signature file.

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:02:17 +0000

Thanks for stopping by and for your kind words Jennifer.

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:02:17 +0000

Thanks for stopping by and for your kind words Jennifer.

By: Jennifer Varner

Jennifer Varner — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:18:17 +0000

Thank you for this post! I am an ecommerce consultant as well as the owner of a business that sells custom and turnkey online businesses. The majority of my clients have no previous ecommerce experience so teaching them the in's and out's of SEO is the biggest part of my job. I will definately refer my clients here as a resource for not only properly promoting their business, but for your other marketing tips as well.

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:05:17 +0000

Lars – yeah, that breaks the barrier of spammy marketing. It really is terrible. You make a great point — choosing forums to participate in within your niche obviously gives you the greatest opportunity to find your target market and having something genuinely useful to contribute. But also – backlinks to your own website from relevant sites help your SEO efforts out more. Its all inter-related.

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:01:53 +0000

Totally agree with you Sam. That's a great way to say it – just be legit! LOL. Also – we get so much more out of the whole experience. For me, when I'm networking – I'm learning!

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:58:02 +0000

Thanks! You know, its really a problem. Its come to the point in the FreelanceMom forum where I have to manually approve new members. I feel so bad to make members wait but the alternative is just too spammy!

By: freelancemom

freelancemom — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:53:32 +0000

Yep! It really is all about the personal connection. People are just to savvy these days to be advertised to so blatantly. We all like to be made to feel special and worthy of interacting with!

By: Lars Tong Strömberg

Lars Tong Strömberg — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:35:56 +0000

Great post not just pointing fingers (which is what I thought the whole text would be about from the heading) but also coming up with some good recommendations about how to do it.

I would like to add that commenting on forums *relevant* for your particular product or service is a hygiene factor. This should be obvious, but I have seen far too many examples of totally non relevant products or services being promoted this way, so I think it´s worth pointing it out.

The worst I have seen (not on a forum though, but on a mailing list) was a person signing up pretending to be a relative of a cancer patient only to start marketing a dating service after the first introduction post. Horrible.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:17:28 +0000

Thanks for the post, there are some useful thoughts there. I think a good rule of thumb to follow is to just have some legitimacy in everything you do, whether it be a post on a forum or a comment on a blog. If you make legitimate contributions, you will have a better chance at being rewarded, even if there may be addtional motives to what you’re doing. Cheers.