Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Find forums in which many subjects are discussed

While there are lots of online forums, it's best to try and get ones that are already big and active, since they are most likely to stay around for a long time. Also, they tend to have a lot of different categories including general or "lounge" sections in which you can post about pretty much anything. This is important, because after a while you do tend to get a bit bored writing comments about just one or two subjects.

Of course the SEO value of backlinks from these miscellaneous sections is probably even less than from from other parts of the forum. Still, a link is a link (although, of course that's not the only reason to post, of course!) and they really do add up over time.

As well as this you are helping the forum keep up steam by adding your thoughts. The more content that the forum has, the higher it ranks in the search engines. And the more likely it is that new people will join. So the cycle continues. (Also, you are generating some content that you can develop into articles or blog posts to use later on.)

Monday, March 8, 2010

Active forums disappearing

Just another thought on forum marketing: I haven't done any posting on forums for a few months now, but decided to get back and do some more recently. Sadly, a couple of the forums I'd been participating in had gone belly up. And they weren't small or dying ones when I last visited; they were actually quite large and active.

It's a bit disappointing, because I had maybe 30 or 40 posts on these forums that I was intending to paste to a file and use as raw material for blog posts and articles. But they've all just disappeared now!

So, it's worth remembering that there is a high attrition rate with these forums. And you should save what you've written as you go along if you want to use it somewhere else.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Online life trumps real one

It's a bit of a cliche that people are spending so much time on the internet these days that they are actually ignoring reality. However, there's quite a bit of truth to it.

Internet addiction is a huge problem in some countries, with numerous clinics being built to address the problem. And there are more and more stories of people ignoring their responsibilities offline. One of the most tragic is the case of a South Korean couple who were so involved with raising an online virtual baby that they let their real child die of neglect.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

LimeDomains looks good for Wordpress

There are a lot of free website hosts and builders out there now. But many of them are substandard. There are a few that stand out from the pack, of course, like Yola, Weebly and Webnode.

Here's another one that looks good: LimeDomains. Actually, it's more of a domain registrar. But if you buy a domain through them, you can get a free website. The deal is not like the above mentioned sites, which have easy to use builders. But it does have a lot of applications that you can easily install. This includes Wordpress.

I haven't tried it yet but this seeems like a very good deal. If you want to get the most out of a Wordpress blog and put ads on it you have to host it yourself. That will cost you at least a few bucks a month with reliable hosting companies. But with LimeDomains, you get the hosting free. And of course you can upgrade as your traffic builds.

I've Googled for reviews about LimeDomains and they seem generally positive. So, definitely an option to consider.