Forum marketing feels like old school digital marketing as it was one of the original ways to drive visitors to a website and get inbound links.

With the advent of SEO, forum marketing fell out of favour, as more web masters looked at short cuts for getting inbound links. Buying links or doing guest blog posts seems to have been the key areas where people have focused their attention to get inbound links.

Short Cuts to Inbound Links

With the recent updates from Google where people have been blatantly guest blogging purely for SEO purposes or buying links, people need to look at more sustainable ways to get inbound links. Business owners seem to want to get the rankings in Google but not put the effort or resources in place to achieve this, which is why they end up doing short cuts. These short cuts get websites into trouble and end up being penalised in Google, which in turn jeopardises the business.

Forum Marketing Making a Come Back?

Forum marketing over the years has fallen out of favour, but perhaps it’s time to dust down the keyboard and revisit this? For a lot of SEO agencies, the key challenge is how they resource this or collaborate with a client on identifying potential forums and questions. However, I truly think that it’s worth the investment of time, because if it’s done sincerely and genuinely, it’ a great opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities and knowledge in the business, which will only drive the credibility further.

Cheap Drum Scanning Forum Marketing

For http://cheapdrumscanning.com/ we have only focused on forum marketing as a key way to build visitors to the website, grow credibility and off the back of that get inbound links.

Below are two examples of mentions of the website on forums, by other forums users.

These were genuine mentions by these people rather than choreographed posts, which makes it all the more real. [You’ll have to excuse the techy talk in here!]. Tim Parkin my business partner spends time each week supporting people in relevant forums on their film photography, answering questions covering a wide range of topics from which film, lens, processing to scanning. It does take an investment of time to achieve the results.

Thinking about Forum Marketing

If you are active in SEO and also thinking about how you can diversify your traffic sources so you’re not totally reliant on Google, forum marketing is certainly worth thinking about. However, it’s about the sustainability and authenticity of the postings. If you want to get back links and mentions, it takes a while to build up your presence, and it’s no short cut, compared to buying links.

What do you think? have you tried forum marketing and how have you found it?