Active forums in your niche that allow signatures are great places to promote your blog. The forum signature is the space below each of your forum posts. In this space, you can add text, links, and sometimes even pictures.
Many business bloggers have gotten great traffic by participating in forums and including a link back to their blog on their forum signature. Whoever reads their forum posts are exposed to this link. And as these bloggers have built a reputation as active forum members, many of the other forum members have clicked through and come across their blog.
Increasing Your Clicks With One Simple Step
Instead of linking to your blog home page, you can increase your clicks by linking to your timely, relevant blog posts.
For example, let’s pretend your online business is selling financial products – maybe ebooks and software – and your URL is financial-products.com. You could make your anchor text your URL. Or your anchor text could be “Great Financial Products”.
But to get the most clicks, I would link to a timely, relevant post and make your anchor text the post title. For example, if you’ve written a blog post about Obama and McCain’s economic plans, you should link to that post in your signature. The U.S. elections are coming up so many people would be interested in your post.
Consider these three signatures. Which do you think will get more clicks?
- financial-products.com
- Great Financial Products
- Who Will Heal the U.S. Economy, Obama or McCain?
I’m willing to bet option 3 will get more clicks.
Yes, it takes a little bit of time to continually change your forum signature to something relevant but the increase in traffic makes it worth it.
The reason this method works is because people are attracted to specific, relevant, timely information.
Furthermore, if the first post they read is relevant, they’ll have a great first impression of your blog and be more likely to subscribe, bookmark, and come back to your blog.