What have you done to promote your forums this week?

Discussion in 'SEO, Traffic and Revenue' started by petertdavis, Aug 18, 2014.

  1. petertdavis

    petertdavis Old Timer

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    I feel like I've been stuck in organic search traffic for too long and over the past couple of months I've been branching out and trying new channels to promote my forums. Some obvious ones like Facebook, Twitter, and such, and some niche-specific ones too. E-mail marketing seems to be something that works pretty well too. What have you done recently?
     
    petertdavis, Aug 18, 2014
    #1
  2. Andy R

    Andy R Lurker Administrator Admin Talk Staff

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    I have been working on this on one site with great success in the past year.

    A long time ago, the classified section of the first forum I founded started to take off. Noting this, I ended up installing PhotoPost Classifieds and we ran on that for year. Over the winter we switch to ClassiPress and at that time I setup some tools that have worked out amazingly. Here is a link to the site:
    http://www.airstreamclassifieds.com/

    First off, we show a modal pop-up to get people to sign up for a daily email digest of new items listed. This allows people to get an convenient summary of all the new listings on a daily basis and obviously helps our classifieds (and the sellers) by spreading the word about their listings via email. This is run through Feedburner (cost = free). We are now up to 3,750 subscribers so that's around 115k emails being sent for us for free, thanks Google! Over the last 30 days this setup has yielded 65,000 clicks leading viewers back to our site. Great for our websit and also for the folks selling on our site.

    Another thing we did on this site that's been working really well is syndicating the ads to the various social media sites to help spread the world. You can see the pages here:
    https://plus.google.com/ AirstreamClassifieds/posts
    https://www.facebook.com/airstreamclassifieds?ref=br_tf
    https://twitter.com/Airstream4Sale

    I wanted to syndicate the ads with the photos attached as they tend to be noticed more text only posts. I tried to use Hootsuite but could never get their RSS to post feature working. I then switch to use IFTTT to conver the RSS into email. From there I email the RSS entries to the BufferApp that is linked to these social media accounts (I think I pay for the premium version).

    Although it's not very valuable, there is some SEO value in the tweets and G+ posts (it's my understanding that Facebook blocks Google so not much SEO value there). The system has been working well and the site has grown considerably after getting all this installed.

    I plan to do the same thing but with forum posts/threads on the forum sites.

    Just thought I would share in case anyone might benefit from learning about this setup.
     
    Andy R, Aug 18, 2014
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    BamaStangGuy and petertdavis like this.
  3. AzzidReign

    AzzidReign Regular Member

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    Currently, we are working on getting a consistent flow of content on twitter and facebook. Once we get whitelisted from certain email providers (due to the nature in which we have set up our email server, using an IP that apparently was blacklisted in the past), we will be sending out newsletters. Still don't know how to I want to go about it with the large number of emails we would be sending out at once.
     
    AzzidReign, Aug 18, 2014
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  4. petertdavis

    petertdavis Old Timer

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    With a membership as large as yours (half a million members, right?), it probably make sense to break it up and mail a fraction of your membership each day for a big newsletter mailing. Outsourcing it to a commercial email service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact would be a better option, but quite expensive. If you could get sponsors to cover the cost of it, that might be the best way.
     
    petertdavis, Aug 19, 2014
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  5. Andy R

    Andy R Lurker Administrator Admin Talk Staff

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    @AzzidReign - We use a self hosted install of Interspire Email Marketer (link). We link our users from the forum to the email newsletter system and usually clean the list with EmailAnswers.com before the first send. You can Google for newsletter best practices where you will find all kinds of stuff to help deliverability. We also use smtp.com for emails, they have been great.
     
    Andy R, Aug 19, 2014
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    AzzidReign likes this.
  6. DriveHosting

    DriveHosting Regular Member

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    Hmmm well lately I've been working on a couple things, today I reviewed some new promotional videos I will be throwing up on youtube in the next few weeks for my hosting company, going to be using some youtube ads. Ive been looking into some other types of advertising maybe with some other companies but nothing else yet.
     
    DriveHosting, Aug 29, 2014
    #6
  7. VladGets

    VladGets Regular Member

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    only youtube, only forums blog, only SEO forums
     
    VladGets, Nov 9, 2016
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  8. pixelek

    pixelek Regular Member

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    $800 on SexAll
     
    pixelek, Oct 4, 2017
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