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How to Get More Clicks on Your Forum Signature

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?

  1. financial-products.com
  2. Great Financial Products
  3. 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.

Tips From Google For Increasing Your Traffic

With Google being one of the most trafficked sites on the global web, it makes sense to listen to them whenever they give out traffic tips.

Maile Ohye, a Google employee, advised website owners to “create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general.”

More specifically, Maile gave these two bullet points:

  • Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.
  • Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.

The first bullet point highlights the importance of blogging with a passion for your industry.  This will generate more traffic because, over time, passionate people stand out from the crowd and attract other fans of the industry.

However, if you don’t have a lot of existing traffic, you’ll have to do some promotion.  Don’t fall the trap of “build it and they will come.”  The web is too crowded with billions of websites to just start a blog and hope people find you.  This is what Maile’s second bullet point is all about.

You need to find out where your target audience is.  Then, go to one of those sites and become a valuable contributing member.  Your reputation will grow as an expert.  Many people will become interested in you and visit your site.

After an extended period of promoting yourself, maybe a year to two years, you can scale back on promotion because you’ll have a critical mass of repeat visitors that will drive traffic for you through word of mouth.

But that initial marketing push is critical to gain traction and brand yourself as an industry expert.

Teach on Your Blog to Increase Traffic and Build Your Brand

I’ve written about 37signals, a web software company, before.  This small business of 12 people has a big influence on the internet software industry.  Their business blog reaches over 70,000 RSS subscribers and has made them a lot of money apart from the main products they sell.

Recently, the founder, Jason Fried, did an interview.  In this interview, Jason talked about his advice not to use a PR firm. Instead, he advocates teaching.

Tim O’Brien: Now, you don’t have a PR firm…

Jason Fried: We don’t.

TO: …unlike a lot of start-ups, unlike a lot of companies.

JF: Right.

TO: And that’s something that you’ve said, “Don’t hire a PR firm.”

JF: Right.

TO: Could you tell me, you know, in hindsight, what were the pros and cons of this?

JF: Sure. Just to come clean about that, we did work with a PR firm once for three months. So I just wanna make sure that I’m not burying that. That was more of an experiment. It worked out pretty well, but it wasn’t really something we wanted to continue to do.

We’ve always chosen to teach to get the word out. So we think that, you know, you can spend a lot on PR firms. Good ones are $10,000.00, $20,000.00 a month, which just seems like a lot of cash to spend on something that isn’t really guaranteeing a whole lot. So we’ve just chosen to teach and to tell a story about who we are and what we believe in. And I think when you teach people, you get a lot of attention. And when you share things a lot of companies wouldn’t share, you get a lot of attention, and the media seems to have liked that a lot.

In every industry, there is an opportunity to teach through a business blog. I’m sure many of you started a small business because you were passionate about your industry. You know things about your industry that the average person in your target audience doesn’t know.

Share those things. Let your target audience know your passion and expertise. Tell them about your views on industry issues.

This teaching strategy will personalize your business and build your reputation as an expert. As you can probably guess, over the long term, this will lead to many repeat visitors, subscribers, and ultimately, more sales.

Your Business Blog’s Design Should Match the Rest of Your Site

If you’re going to add a blog to your site, make sure to match the blog’s design with the rest of your site. This is a good usability practice. Plus, a matching blog design builds the brand of your business. People will relate your awesome blog content to the rest of your site. On the other hand, if your blog design doesn’t match the rest of your site, your site visitors will be confused.

Here are screenshots of a good example and a bad example of blog design.

Good Example

This is the home page of Prosper.com, a peer to peer lending site.

And here is their blog.

As you can see, the blog layout is very similar to the home page. The colors and the header are the same. Even the font and font size of the main body text is the same. No one would be confused about whether or not the blog is part of the site.

Bad Example

Now, consider this wedding site (link not given to protect the guilty).

I am not a designer but the site looks pretty good. The orange color scheme looks nice and the home page is not too cluttered.

However, when you go to the blog, you’ll see this.

It seems like you’re on a totally different site, right? The colors are different. The header is different. Even the font and font size of the main copy text are different. There is nothing on the blog design to remind you of the home page.

Our Blog Design Services

If you’re looking for a design or redesign of your blog, feel free to contact us. We have a great team of designers that can design your blog to fit the rest of your site.