Forums are a great place to post articles that include links to your web pages
Forums are a great place to post articles that include links to your web pages. Forums are places where people interested in a particular topic can go to read posts by other people interested in the same niche.
All of the big internet sites – such as Google, Yahoo and Bing – offer forums on every topic imaginable. Even social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn host forums where you can post your articles. Your articles can even be broken up into smaller pieces and posted as comments to other people’s forum postings.
Any Topic, Anywhere
Forums on just about any topic can be found on any of the big internet services – such as Bing, Yahoo and Google – or look for forums on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The more forums you post on, the more opportunities you have to attract customers to your squeeze page. Plus your posts will remain available to the search engines for a long time.
Better than Backlinks
Backlinks were the primary way Google and search engines determined a sites ranking up until a couple of years ago. But Google changed its search engine algorithm in 2011 and again in 2012 to put less emphasis on backlinks and more emphasis on social approval signals.
These are things like Facebook “Likes”, Google+ +1’s, and the number of times your link has been Tweeted on Twitter.
What happened was that a lot of people in Internet marketing figured out that having a lot of backlinks would get your pages ranked high. So they started to create hundreds of artificial backlinks just to fool Google into thinking that their site was more important than it actually was.
Panda and Penguin
And it worked … for a while. Eventually, Google figured out what was happening and that’s when it rolled out its Panda and Penguin upgrades to its search engine algorithm.
These two upgrades now give more weight to social approval, and it makes sense because social media is the way people today let other people know about the things they like the most.
So if your website gets a lot of social approval, it’s going to be ranked high on Google.
Attracting Social Approval Signals
The key to getting a lot of social approval is to be active on social media. Although it’s free, it tends to take a lot of time and effort … which, of course, is one of the hallmarks of a free traffic method. You also have to make it easy for people to give you social approval — so you want to include widgets on your web pages that let them give you Facebook “Likes” and Google+ +1’s right there from your page.
Another benefit of social media marketing is that it’s easy to categorize users according to preferences.
So in addition to using it to get social approval to improve your page rankings and boost your traffic, you also target your affiliate products to a highly specialized group of consumers: Those who are looking to buy exactly the products they are promoting.
Building Relationships
Social media sites are more informal than sales pages or retail sites, so your marketing plan needs to take a non-traditional approach. You can’t just send ads for your affiliate products to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers because they will think you are spamming them and will block you. Instead, to be successful you have to take the time to develop personal relationships with your customers.
Once you have gained their trust, you can promote your products in the form of product reviews,recommendations and offhand remarks, rather than blatant promotion.
When launching a social media marketing campaign, you want to identify people who are interested in the types of products you are promoting.
For example, search for Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype groups that are related to your niche, join them and interact with other members. Use Twitter tags … which are hash marks followed by keywords, such as #Forex … to find tweets about your niche. Then follow the people who are sending them. On Twitter, if you follow somebody, they usually will follow you back.
Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.