Friday, June 18, 2010

Increase Targeted Traffic to your Website: Forum Posting

Case Study:  I have a good friend, that owns a Concierge Service.  He has a website and has set up his social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook) to reflect his company name and brand.  What's extra special about my friend is that he really KNOWS and understands his target market.  Because he was in the unique position to have been a professional driver for his nitch.


He has identified their
  • Gender
  • Professions and Titles
  • Income
  • Passions, Worries and Frustrations
  • Spending Habits: what they buy, eat, drink, what magazines and newspapers they read
He seeks out his target market on Twitter and Facebook and sends them great information and articles that interest them and solves their problems, and drives business to Concierge Service.  In other words - he finds these articles, and then 'shares' or 'posts' to his facebook and twitter pages and uses the information to help his target market -- almost similar to looking at all the daily newspapers and clipping out articles that is of interest to his target market, and disgarding the articles they would not like.  A great service to his clients, personally, I appreciate his articles on upcoming technology and how it relates to my business, and when I need concierge services, he is who I call.

Awesome, but there is a missed opportunity here.  Why not post intelligent answers/responses/comments on the Articles themselves.  The technique is called forum posting, and it is a method to increase targeted traffic to your own website.


This example also works for Authors, for example, I have a book, 6 Simple Steps to Avoid Foreclosure (available on Amazon.com).  When my target market is fearful of foreclosure, they usually go to a search engine like Google for a search related to foreclosure.  They end up a forum posting where someone else has asked the question, or they post the question, "how can I save my home from foreclosure", or a similar question.  And they will find my intelligent response, which will also include my Name and website information.

K. Patrice Williams JD
Author- 6 Simple Steps to Avoid Foreclosure
http://www.avoidforeclosuremanual.com/
Or Available in Paperback on Amazon.com

Targeted traffic that has a concern about foreclosure is now driven to my website.

To take it a step further, you can create seperate, unique bit.ly's (http://www.bit.ly.com/) which is a shortend, identifyable url to your website, for each post.  Keep every post url in a spreadsheet with its associated bit.ly so that you can track what articles drove what traffic, which gives you more detailed information about your customer.

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