7 ways of promoting your forum with a bit of money.

[JayJACKEL!]

1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).

2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.

3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.

4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point’s market place.

5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.

6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe or PayPerPost.com.

7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance.

Hope this guide helps some of the newer (and older!) forums out there 🙂

Regards,
mYst​

 

[Justin]

Well some of these will waste your time and money if you do not watch them. If you just start a Adword capign and leave it there, you may choose horrible keywords, loose all your money and have no one there. Watch to see what works and doesn't.

 

[Kev]

Thanks for the tips 🙂

 

[Sunny]

Well some of these will waste your time and money if you do not watch them. If you just start a Adword capign and leave it there, you may choose horrible keywords, loose all your money and have no one there. Watch to see what works and doesn't.

Keywords are definitely a hot topic when it comes to Google and their advertising and search engine.
If you do invest money in an Adwords campaign, make sure you at least study up a little bit on how Googles keywords and SEO work beforehand rather than after.

It will save you time and money, and get you the most decent traffic 🙂

 

[JayJACKEL!]

You're welcome guys 🙂

 

[Ashley S]

Thanks Myst 🙂.

 

[sapper]

Most of this is irrelevant for forums, because the content of a forum changes on an hour by hour if not minute by minute basis, and Google nor any other indexing bot does not crawl you site that often, what you have to remember is that google is primarily concerned with the business market and business sites.

An adword campaign for a forum does little or nothing for traffic, I took advantage of their £50 free adword campaign, it's a mine field, and despite working to their guidelines it generated little more than no traffic to my site, bidding @ .01p will get you very little advertising in top search queries, there are bids out there for 100p to get those and they don't succeed all the time.

A friend of mine runs an online buisiness call the www.thegardensuperstore.co.uk, he spends around £2.5k a year on adwords, and he is nowhere near top on searches.

Keep your money in your back pocket unless you are prepared to spend a lot, because Google tells no-one how it's system operates, even the most expensive of SEO campaigns is down to a lot of guess work.
What Google will tell you is that relevant and original content is worth a lot more than most of what some SEO's will tell you to do

 

[Fergal]

sapper as forums become more active, Google begins to index them much quicker. Content on my forums regularly appears on Google, in less than 24 hours after its posted.

As regards Adwords, if you bid high enough you will get to the top, or if you find much less competitive keywords you can get to the top for lower value bids. Whether or not it's worth spending that money to promote your forum is another question.

 

[Kaiser.]

Well written, I plan to get adwords.

 

[BlazingBlue]

I don't understand adwords. Why would you need that many keywords?

 

[Fergal]

BlazingBlue Adwords is Google's Pay Per Click advertising network. You bid on certain keywords that you want your ad to display for and then every time someone clicks on one of your ads you are charged the bid price. You don't need any specific amount of keywords, but the more terms you bid on the more traffic you are likely to receive.

Does that answer your question?

 

[Kaiser.]

BlazingBlue Adwords is Google's Pay Per Click advertising network. You bid on certain keywords that you want your ad to display for and then every time someone clicks on one of your ads you are charged the bid price. You don't need any specific amount of keywords, but the more terms you bid on the more traffic you are likely to receive.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks answers some questions I had.

 

[devashishseo]

Thanks for these tips, they are really important.