There are many, many ways to drive FREE traffic to your Blog.

The technique that I’m going to show you is wonderful because it is very natural and organic, and adds content to the internet, which helps everyone.

Posting to Yahoo/Google Forums

This technique isn’t unique and certainly isn’t new, but it is very effective and FREE to do.  I have used this technique with great success.

What is a Forum?

It’s really nothing more than an online ‘meeting place’, usually organized around a certain theme.  And there are a myriad of themes and forums - everything from cat grooming to lawnmower repair.

Here are urls for the two largest forum hosts:

Google: http://groups.google.com/
Yahoo: http://groups.yahoo.com/

I would use both of these for maximum exposure.

What you want to do is sign up for a free account in both Google and Yahoo Groups.

Next, you want to find groups that relate to your blog’s niche.  So, if your blog is about feline care, you might search on the words feline, cat, kitten, etc. Then, you want to join each group that seems to fit.  Most of the quality forums are going to require that you join before you can post. 

Each forum is controlled by one or more moderators and the moderator sets the rules for joining.  I’ve joined some forums where I had to submit a bio before they would let me in.  As a rule of the thumb, the more stringent the membership, the higher quality the forum - so don’t be put off by this level of scrutiny.

Your Goal

Now, remember, we are not on the forum just to read and post for our edification sake, we are there to advertise our blog.  However, this has to be done very subtly, else you can get banned from the forum altogether.  I’ll talk more about the etiquette in a minute.

Here is what you do

What you are going to do is either:

• Make a helpful comment to another’s post
• Create your own post, offering information of value that’s related to the theme of the forum

Then at the bottom of our post/comment, we are going to leave what’s called a ’sig tag’ - which stands for signature tag.  The sig tag should be understated.  Here is an example:

R/Stan Beck
http://AskStanBeck.com for helpful, practical tips on blogging.

Do you see?  Very short and sweet and not ’salesy’.

Forum Etiquette

Forum etiquette is really common sense - make sure your postings, comments fit within the spirit of the forum.  Don’t come across as anything but a contributor attempting to help the forum members.

Frequency

You want to get into the habit of being a daily contributor if you can - you are trying to build up trust and brand name recognition for your blog via your sig tag - this is going to take a couple of weeks.  Be patient and disciplined - this will work for you.

So What?

So what does all this activity buy you?  Two things actually. First, the people who are reading your posts and comments will appreciate your contribution, see your sig tag and will click through to your blog.  Second, the search engines love forums because of the content and they will pick up on your comments and your sig tag and index them - which means that you will get traffic to your blog from search engines based on your posting/comments - How Great Is That!?!

So, post often to as many forums as you can handle - it will pay you back with FREE streams of highly targetted traffic.