3 Tips for Effective Link Promotion on Niche Forums
Contents
Promoting links on niche forums is a great way to interact with your target audience. However, you may be poorly promoting these links. Needless to say, poor communication with potential customers can kill your business. Unfortunately, this is just one of the issues of poor link promotion.
The good news is that effective link promotion isn't hard to achieve – in fact, you'll be surprised at how simple it is! With a few basic tips, you could improve your linking efforts, gain more website traffic, and increase your conversions. You'll be able to ensure quality engagement on your chosen forums, and your efforts will go some way in establishing you as a credible industry resource.
In this post, we’ll share three tips for effective link promotion. You’ll learn how to use each tip effectively, as well as how Pretty Links can play a key role in effective link promotion. Let’s get started!
1. Choose the Right Niche Forums
Bodybuilding.com is an example of a niche-specific forum – in this case, fitness.
A niche forum is an online community that focuses its conversations around a particular area of interest. When it comes to choosing the right niche forums to promote your links, there are two things you’ll want to consider. First, you’ll want to find forums where your audience hangs out. Second, you'll want to select forums that enable linking.
For effective link promotion, choosing the right forums to participate in is important to receive suitable benefits (for example, by sending traffic to your website). This also contributes to your credibility – after all, your advice, insight, or product won’t be recognized if you’re posting in the wrong places.
To choose the right niche forums, there are a few techniques you can implement. For example:
- Explore the forums in your niche: Search “‘your niche’ + forum” in Google, then perform an audience analysis to determine whether the forum contains your key demographic.
- Use your website visitor demographics: Working in the opposite direction of the above technique, this will help you to find likely forums your audience uses.
At this point, you should now have a narrowed list of forums on which to focus your efforts. However, before you jump in let’s take a look at the next tip, which gives you a better idea of what to link to.
2. Link to Purpose-Built Landing Pages
List Building School uses a landing page that highlights one product (in this case, their e-book).
A landing page is a dedicated section of a website that focuses on a particular product or service. In terms of niche forum linking, landing pages tend to be a more effective target URL than home page links, especially if you’re hoping for page visitors to perform a specific action (such as purchasing a product).
The main benefit here is that you'll appear more helpful to forum readers. A specific link can offer more value (assuming it's relevant), and this lends itself to credibility.
When linking to landing pages, you'll want to follow two crucial steps to ensure your links are viewed as valuable additions to the conversation:
- Use relevant links. This means only adding landing page links that are directly related to the conversation taking place.
- Use a 'pretty link'. Especially on public forums, where anyone can join and take part, it’s important that your links are descriptive and non-spammy. A pretty link (also known as a shortened or branded link) can help you to achieve this, as they enable you to add a detailed slug that directly describes the landing page’s focus (and, therefore, the link’s target).
In terms of credibility, providing relevant and shortened links is one of the best ways to go. Speaking of shortened links, let’s take a closer look at how to properly use them on your forum postings.
3. Use Branded, Shortened Links
Branded links can be used across the web, even on social media. PlayStation does so effectively on their Twitter page.
Branded, shortened links are those that are transformed from long and mysterious to short and focused. This is a crucial step in your link promotion efforts, as it makes your links (and you) appear more credible. This means more clicks on your links, which can mean more traffic, and possible conversions down the line.
In addition, branded links are also less distracting and more pleasing to the eye. Readers tend to scan websites, making branded links a great asset because they're short and clear on what the link contains.
Fortunately, creating short, branded links is simple when you use a dedicated plugin – such as Pretty Links:
Once you’ve purchased a plan and installed the plugin on your WordPress website, the link creation process consists of three main steps. After that, incorporating the links into your forum posts is a breeze. Simply copy the newly-created URL, and add it to the anchor text within your post. That's it – utilizing shortened links on forums as part of your link promotion strategy is easy!
Conclusion
Link promotion is an effective marketing technique that can drive traffic to your website. Niche forums offer an optimal environment for link promotion, and provide you with both a target audience and platform for sharing your insights. In addition, they can also offer unique benefits – such as building authority and credibility for you and your business.
In this post, we’ve provided you with three tips that can help improve the results of your link promotion campaigns on niche forums. To quickly recap, they are:
- Choose the right niche forums.
- Link to purpose-built landing pages.
- Use branded, shortened links.
Do you have any questions about effectively using niche forums for link promotion? Let us know in the comments section below!
About John Hughes
John is a blogging addict, WordPress fanatic, and staff writer.