Reasons why theezy thinks typical promotion forum services aren't necessary or effective.
Promotion forums (or Advertising forums) are great devices for people to socialize and network with other webmasters. However after running a successful advertising forum for two years and being a member of several, I came to the realization that the “services” on a promotion forum are quite pointless. They only provide a forum owner with piece of mind. As in, after going to a promotion forum and requesting all the services, they feel like they've accomplished something positive. But in reality they will receive little to no results from their efforts. I will admit that I do request services once in a while in the slim chance that I might get a positive result out of it, even though I know nothing is probably going to happen.
I will start off analyzing the typical services found on a typical advertising forum..
Banner Rotation:
While this may seem like an attractive service to utilize, chances are nobody will click your ad. If you are lucky you might get one or two clicks during the duration your banner is in the rotation. Most of us have trained our minds to ignore banner rotations. With google ads and similar adverts cluttering up most of the websites/forums we go to, nobody really pays any attention to banners. You will probably get a lot more results placing that same banner in your signatures on the forums you go to.
Button Advertising:
These are usually found in two forms. The most common is a scrolling affiliates bar across the bottom of a forum or placed on a portal page.
1) The scrolling bar is visually annoying and probably has the least chances of being clicked. Nobody wants to try to click on a moving target, even if it stops when you mouse over it, Lol. I doubt anyone will watch the entire line of buttons scroll by, so if your button is one of the 1st in the line, chances are nobody will even see it. If placed on a portal page, chances are people are going to look for the “Enter Forum” link and not even bother to read or click anything on the portal page.
2) The second most seen is: the button is placed in a box with a text description of the forum underneath it. As I said about the banner ads, chances are most people will simply scroll right past this.
Reviews:
These do not provide any sort of advertising or exposure but maybe helpful to some. It is simply one person who tells you their opinion of how you should be running your forum. The funny thing is (and no offense to any reviewers in particular) most reviewers themselves do not have a successful forum or have ever ran one. How can we trust the advice from someone who cannot even achieve the things they preach about in their reviews? You could follow everything the reviewer suggests, and even then you might not get any different results. A second opinion is always a great thing to have, but I believe that the feedback given from your actual members (by them posting feedback or PM'ing you suggestions) is the most valuable. They are the most important people to pay attention to, not someone who has glanced at your forum for a couple minutes and thinks they can make a snap judgment and tell you everything that is wrong or right about your forum.
Posting Packages:
A staff member of the advertising forum joins your forum and makes some topics/posts. Now these are great to increase your member count by one or two give your forum a tiny bit of additional posts. However, the package staffer is not at your forum because they want to be, they are there because they are required to do their job in order to keep their staff position on the advertising forum they came from. Once they have made X amount of posts on your forum, they will leave and probably never return. In my experiences the quality of the posts made by these people are low quality. They simply reply to whatever is easiest to reply to quickly. Such as “What is your favorite color” and topics like that. I've yet to see someone doing a package reply to a more serious topic with something insightful and meaningful. Sure these are great to stimulate activity, but how rewarding is it? Wouldn't you rather have real people who joined your forum because they actually wanted to be there? Wouldn't you rather participate in discussions with people who are only interested in actually having a discussion (instead of someone in a race to post whatever just to get the package done)? I guess this paragraph could apply to post exchanges as well.
Last but not least....
Basic Advert Threads
Now this isnt really a service, but I thought I would talk about it anyways. You all know the drill. You post a topic talking about your forum/website. You may come back every couple days to “bump” your topic. I find these to be a little bit more productive than utilizing the pointless services. A lot of people go to these promotion forums (or even go to a different genre forum, like a general discussion or specific topic based forum that happens to have a basic adverting section) and actually look at people's advert threads for new forums to join up when they are bored. While a forum owner is bumping their own forum, they might take a look at what else is being advertised. Your basic advert thread will probably get you the most results on an advertising forum. Now for the negatives... These can fall on to the second, third, fourth page in a matter of a day or two. Buried where nobody will look.
Some promotion forums allow you to bump every single day. This is very generous, but if that particular promotion forum is very active, then everyone will be back everyday to bump. You could bump your topic and a couple hours later, its buried again. Whats the point of even bumping at such forums? I suppose if you plan out your bumps when the most people are online at once, you might get a shot at some good exposure.
On the reverse side, some promotion forums have very strict bump limits where you can only bump every week or two.. or not at all. You may create a new topic every two weeks instead (or something like that). Your topic can be buried quickly on these forums as well, and with strict rules enforced, there is nothing you can do about it for a while. Unless of course you get a friend to reply to your topic for you, but that might get you into trouble if you get caught.
Chances are the promotion forums with strict bump limits are less active. At the ones that have generous rules, people are more anxious to go to that forum everyday to bump. While they are there, they might participate in some off topic discussions.
…..Okay... Got all those services talked about. As I said: "Promotion forums (or Advertising forums) are great devices for people to socialize and network with other webmasters." However, promotion forums are, in reality, all smoke and mirrors that provide false hope with their services. There is usually a lot of people at promotion forums and the best way to use them, is just to be there. You can chat in the off topic areas and get to know one another. If people like you or you have an attractive signature, people will be inclined to click it and join your forum. I call this “sig-ver-tising.” Now by my theory, you don't even need to go to an advertising forum to socialize and sigvertise. You can achieve this at any type of forum. If you want to chat about forum administration, coding, scripting languages, modifications, softwares, etc etc etc, the best place to get this done is at an actual webmaster forum. Chances are they have much much broader selection of categories to discuss everything a forum/website owner could ever want to talk about. If you simply want to network / socialize and make friends, you can do this at any forum, no mater what genre it is.
The above is just my opinions, and you may have differing ones. So if you do, feel free to pick apart everything I've rambled on about and tell me how wrong I am. I would be disappointed you didn't....
Lol. 😛
Promotion forums (or Advertising forums) are great devices for people to socialize and network with other webmasters. However after running a successful advertising forum for two years and being a member of several, I came to the realization that the “services” on a promotion forum are quite pointless. They only provide a forum owner with piece of mind. As in, after going to a promotion forum and requesting all the services, they feel like they've accomplished something positive. But in reality they will receive little to no results from their efforts. I will admit that I do request services once in a while in the slim chance that I might get a positive result out of it, even though I know nothing is probably going to happen.
I will start off analyzing the typical services found on a typical advertising forum..
Banner Rotation:
While this may seem like an attractive service to utilize, chances are nobody will click your ad. If you are lucky you might get one or two clicks during the duration your banner is in the rotation. Most of us have trained our minds to ignore banner rotations. With google ads and similar adverts cluttering up most of the websites/forums we go to, nobody really pays any attention to banners. You will probably get a lot more results placing that same banner in your signatures on the forums you go to.
Button Advertising:
These are usually found in two forms. The most common is a scrolling affiliates bar across the bottom of a forum or placed on a portal page.
1) The scrolling bar is visually annoying and probably has the least chances of being clicked. Nobody wants to try to click on a moving target, even if it stops when you mouse over it, Lol. I doubt anyone will watch the entire line of buttons scroll by, so if your button is one of the 1st in the line, chances are nobody will even see it. If placed on a portal page, chances are people are going to look for the “Enter Forum” link and not even bother to read or click anything on the portal page.
2) The second most seen is: the button is placed in a box with a text description of the forum underneath it. As I said about the banner ads, chances are most people will simply scroll right past this.
Reviews:
These do not provide any sort of advertising or exposure but maybe helpful to some. It is simply one person who tells you their opinion of how you should be running your forum. The funny thing is (and no offense to any reviewers in particular) most reviewers themselves do not have a successful forum or have ever ran one. How can we trust the advice from someone who cannot even achieve the things they preach about in their reviews? You could follow everything the reviewer suggests, and even then you might not get any different results. A second opinion is always a great thing to have, but I believe that the feedback given from your actual members (by them posting feedback or PM'ing you suggestions) is the most valuable. They are the most important people to pay attention to, not someone who has glanced at your forum for a couple minutes and thinks they can make a snap judgment and tell you everything that is wrong or right about your forum.
Posting Packages:
A staff member of the advertising forum joins your forum and makes some topics/posts. Now these are great to increase your member count by one or two give your forum a tiny bit of additional posts. However, the package staffer is not at your forum because they want to be, they are there because they are required to do their job in order to keep their staff position on the advertising forum they came from. Once they have made X amount of posts on your forum, they will leave and probably never return. In my experiences the quality of the posts made by these people are low quality. They simply reply to whatever is easiest to reply to quickly. Such as “What is your favorite color” and topics like that. I've yet to see someone doing a package reply to a more serious topic with something insightful and meaningful. Sure these are great to stimulate activity, but how rewarding is it? Wouldn't you rather have real people who joined your forum because they actually wanted to be there? Wouldn't you rather participate in discussions with people who are only interested in actually having a discussion (instead of someone in a race to post whatever just to get the package done)? I guess this paragraph could apply to post exchanges as well.
Last but not least....
Basic Advert Threads
Now this isnt really a service, but I thought I would talk about it anyways. You all know the drill. You post a topic talking about your forum/website. You may come back every couple days to “bump” your topic. I find these to be a little bit more productive than utilizing the pointless services. A lot of people go to these promotion forums (or even go to a different genre forum, like a general discussion or specific topic based forum that happens to have a basic adverting section) and actually look at people's advert threads for new forums to join up when they are bored. While a forum owner is bumping their own forum, they might take a look at what else is being advertised. Your basic advert thread will probably get you the most results on an advertising forum. Now for the negatives... These can fall on to the second, third, fourth page in a matter of a day or two. Buried where nobody will look.
Some promotion forums allow you to bump every single day. This is very generous, but if that particular promotion forum is very active, then everyone will be back everyday to bump. You could bump your topic and a couple hours later, its buried again. Whats the point of even bumping at such forums? I suppose if you plan out your bumps when the most people are online at once, you might get a shot at some good exposure.
On the reverse side, some promotion forums have very strict bump limits where you can only bump every week or two.. or not at all. You may create a new topic every two weeks instead (or something like that). Your topic can be buried quickly on these forums as well, and with strict rules enforced, there is nothing you can do about it for a while. Unless of course you get a friend to reply to your topic for you, but that might get you into trouble if you get caught.
Chances are the promotion forums with strict bump limits are less active. At the ones that have generous rules, people are more anxious to go to that forum everyday to bump. While they are there, they might participate in some off topic discussions.
…..Okay... Got all those services talked about. As I said: "Promotion forums (or Advertising forums) are great devices for people to socialize and network with other webmasters." However, promotion forums are, in reality, all smoke and mirrors that provide false hope with their services. There is usually a lot of people at promotion forums and the best way to use them, is just to be there. You can chat in the off topic areas and get to know one another. If people like you or you have an attractive signature, people will be inclined to click it and join your forum. I call this “sig-ver-tising.” Now by my theory, you don't even need to go to an advertising forum to socialize and sigvertise. You can achieve this at any type of forum. If you want to chat about forum administration, coding, scripting languages, modifications, softwares, etc etc etc, the best place to get this done is at an actual webmaster forum. Chances are they have much much broader selection of categories to discuss everything a forum/website owner could ever want to talk about. If you simply want to network / socialize and make friends, you can do this at any forum, no mater what genre it is.
The above is just my opinions, and you may have differing ones. So if you do, feel free to pick apart everything I've rambled on about and tell me how wrong I am. I would be disappointed you didn't....
Lol. 😛
