Drive Relevant, Quality Traffic to Your Website(s)
Posted by Administrator on September 22, 2009
When trying to increase the most valuable analytics on your website such as time spent on site, low bounce rate, and pages viewed, there is one tested method of achieving such results. The use of forums is an excellent approach for getting the good stats on your website. Yes, having a high visit rate is nice, but what are those visits worth if the visitor is only staying for 15 seconds and leaving from the index page?
The web developer and designer resource website sitepoint.com has a great article, "10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums" authored by Josh Klein. Josh is a web strategist and consultant based out of New York City. He writes a blog about how to make and promote web sites that are worth caring about.
He is a frequent poster in the sitepoint.com forum and he lists three specific reasons why he likes to use that forum to drive traffic to his website:
"1. It's a forum largely for web developers, and I have experience in this field, so I can have thoughtful discussions with my peers.
2. My expertise as an online marketer complements the typical forum member: web designers and developers.
3. My site's target audience overlaps with the forum's audience."
And he goes on to say, "Although the SitePoint forum does not deliver thousands of visitors to my blog each month, the forum traffic is of the highest quality. They read more, participate more, and come back for more."
What's most striking is the compelling evidence he offers up as reasons for using forums.
He states that:
> 71% of the non-forum visitors leave before viewing a second page
Only 30% of forum visitors leave immediately
> 83% of non-forum visitors are new to the site
75% of forum visitors are returning for a second time (or more)
> Non-forum visitors view 2.5 pages
Forum visitors typically view over 9 pages
> Non-forum visitors spent 3 minutes on average on his site
Forum visitors spent an average of 18 mins on his site
Below are Josh's 10 rules to successfully leverage forums to increase the quality of web traffic to you site.
1. Build Your Profile
2. Follow the Rules
3. Start by Responding
4. Contribute Your Expertise
5. Don't Be a "Me Too" Poster
6. Don't Self-promote
7. Explain Yourself, but Be Brief
8. If You're Wrong, Say So
9. Write Intelligently and Correctly
10. Negativity is a No-no
Definitely a good read. Make sure you visit the blog for full explanations of each step.
