Getting the Most from Promotion Forums
There are many great services and features offered within the most popular promotion and webmaster forums. More often than not, members have options ranging from reviews, packages, signature ads, and other advertisement on the board. However, these are not the services you should be putting to work! Promotion forums give many under appreciated services that actually help you more than popular features.
Social Media Advertisements Social Media ads such as Tweets or Facebook posts are one of the most commonly glanced over features of a promotion forum. Why? Because most people rationalize that no one is actually going to read the tweet, therefore, why spend the money on a hundred and forty characters?
The trick behind social media advertisements is not for the visitors, but for the search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have spiders all over social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Whenever there is a tweet containing a link, they automatically follow the link and index the contents. What that means is: the more you tweet (given reasonable space, of course) the more search engines like index your site, providing you better SEO. So, the magic isn’t in the new members from social media advertisements, it’s in the search engines!
Exchanges
Many people look at exchanges as a way to get temporary post increases or members by exchanging forum currency or the same service back to another individual. However, if used correctly, exchanges can benefit your website more than any other feature available. There are many different types of exchanges that go on within promotion forums. Member exchanges, “I’ll post on your forum if you post on mine,” and “Five
The most useful exchanges happen when two web masters exchange ad space, links, or participate in projects such as banner jumbles. Each of these yield free advertisement to hundreds of people, and all it costs is for you to return the favor! Remember back to the first point I made about search engines indexing your site when there is a tweet or Facebook ad? Well the same happens when your banner or link is on another webmaster’s site and they get indexed! You get even more search engine exposure through simple exchanges such as these!
Community Support The last most valuable resource a promotion forum can offer is an extensive community of webmasters, all with the same goal as you: to better their forum. These are also webmasters that may be more experienced than you that can offer support and feedback. Many communities have boards that allow technical support questions, peer-to-peer reviews, and other boards based around managing your site. Spending time in any of these boards, just reading what others have to say, can be valuable to the development of your personal forum.
In the end, many promotion forums can offer services such as packages and reviews, but those services may not help you and your board as much as you think. Instead, invaluable resources such as social media advertisements, exchanges, and community support can have a massive impact on your forum, if you use them correctly.
