I will be authoring a series of 5 articles on the topic of marketing your blog.  I’ll be discussing various and diverse ways to do this.  These five marketing methods will be online marketing methods.

One of the ways that I use to market Babywearing Buzz, is to participate in online forums.  I was introduced to online forums when I was pregnant with my daughter.  I learned that there were “birth club” where moms who’s children had the same due date as yours could chat with each other.  Moms discussed a full range of topics baby related and non baby related.

I quickly found forums where you could attach a “signature” to any post you made.  That signature could be a link to your blog, company, or any other statement you wanted to make.  There are many forums which do not allow you to advertise in a signature.  It is considered “spam.”  But there are many others that do allow this.  Before beginning to participate in a forum, you must read the rules attached to that particular forum regarding this topic.

When making posts in an online forum, you usually aren’t allowed to make a post like:

“Please check out my blog.  The link is below!”  You will probably be warned by an administrator that this is not allowed and your post will be deleted.  What you have to do is gain the confidence and friendship of the forum participators by becoming a regular in the forum.  As you gain their confidence, they will gradually begin to naturally be more curious about who you are and click on your signature that way.

Once you start participating in a forum, it can become addicting!  You form friendships with these people and want to “chat” with them.  Once you’re grounded in one forum, you’ll want to choose another forum to participate in.  Choose a forum where there will be readers who will be interested in your blog’s topic.  For instance, if the topic of your blog is shopping, you don’t want to participate in a forum on fishing.  You probably won’t get too many clicks, and it might be difficult to reply to threads (unless you’re an avid fisherwoman!).  Choose a forum related to shopping, or a forum that has a particular “room” devoted to shopping.