21st Century Affiliate Marketing

News and views about affiliate marketing in the 21st century

Archive for the 'Forums' Category

Why do some forums thrive and others just seem to wilt?

August 24th, 2009 by John Dilbeck

I have several forums that I manage and I don’t know the answer to what appears to be a simple question.

Why do some of them thrive and grow while others just wilt?

Two that are thriving are actually social networking communities hosted on Ning.com, but they feel very much like a forum to me.

My Squidoo Marketing community continues to grow very well and the membership is approaching 200 members. I join in the conversations when I have something to say, watch out for spam, and check in two or three times per day, but the majority of the activity comes from the members interacting with each other.

Murphy Connections is growing, too, but a bit more slowly. That’s understandable since it’s geographically targeted to a small town in the mountains of western North Carolina. Yet, even though it draws from a smaller target group, it is growing and the participation is pretty good.

On the other hand, my A Year From Now Forum, which is tied in with my Act On Your Dream! website just isn’t doing anything. Part of the fault is mine, because I really neglected it over much of the last couple of years when I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. Still, it’s getting an average of 50 visitors per day, yet practically none of them are joining and participating. It’s obvious that the posts are getting read, but replies and new threads are practically non-existent.

Is it the subject matter? Am I reaching the wrong audience? Is the forum just not worth joining and participating?

I don’t have much ego involved in this, so please feel free to be honest with your comments. Just remember that honest doesn’t mean the same thing as brutal.

I’m hoping your fresh eyes on the subject will help me learn what I can do differently to improve.

I’m hoping you can offer some advice to help me.

Act on your dream!

JD

Category: Act On Your Dream!, Communities, Forums, Social Networking | 22 Comments »

Where do you promote your blog?

August 22nd, 2008 by User ImageJohn Dilbeck

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Category: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Directories, Blogging, Business Networking, Forums, Promote Yourself, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter | 7 Comments »

APsense - A Free Business Social Network

October 3rd, 2007 by User ImageJohn Dilbeck

I’ve been looking for a good social networking site that is specifically targeted at helping us promote our businesses and meet other business owners and entrepreneurs.

Of the dozen or more I joined, each has it’s good and bad points, but most of them don’t work the way I do and I’ve had a hard time finding one with the members I want to meet and interact with.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I took some time to really look into APsense and liked what I saw.

So, I’ve decided that the majority of my business-related social networking will be done on APsense and I invite you to join me there - it’s free.

One of the things I like about APsense is that you get a profile page (as every other site offers) and a business center where you can promote business opportunities, advertise your products and services, collect testimonials, list resources you recommend, promote your business, and do other valuable promotional things.

When I got there, I searched the groups and found that several niches in which I’m active were not represented, so I created five new groups:

I’ve joined several other existing groups and started meeting interesting people.

If you want to try out APsense, come check it out for yourself.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Category: Act On Your Dream!, Advertising, Business Networking, Communities, Forums, Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It | No Comments »

Do you know The Secret?

February 10th, 2007 by User ImageJohn Dilbeck

Something interesting has been happening over the last year or so.

When looking for places to promote my businesses, I found a new social networking site called Powerful Intentions and set out to create a presence there. Come visit my Powerful Intentions profile, if you would like.

At the time, I was not aware of the Law of Attraction and had no real interest in it. Now, this is not true for my life as a whole, just for my focus last year.

Many years ago, I was very interested in things related to manifesting our own reality and spent quite a bit of time learning and trying various things.

Now, fast forward to last October or November…

My friend, Linda Miller, was talking about “The Secret” and I started seeing it everywhere I went, especially on Powerful Intentions.

I learned about Abraham/Hicks and read one of the books. I started thinking about manifesting reality rather than working so hard to make it happen.

I got a copy of The Secret in December and didn’t know what to think about it the first time I watched it. I liked it better the second time, and I plan to watch it a third time this afternoon.

Last Thursday, I watched Oprah’s show on The Secret movie and book, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since the show.

There are a couple of forums on Powerful Intentions where you can learn more about The Secret and the Law of Attraction. Join the discussions or just lurk, as you desire.

To join in the discussion, I’ve added a new section to my A Year From Now Forum dedicated to discussing The Law of Attraction.

You are invited to discuss these topics to come to my forum and join in the discussion.

If you haven’t seen The Secret, you can purchase a copy from Powerful Intentions.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!,

JD

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Category: Forums, Musings, Powerful Intentions | No Comments »

Share your success stories with the world

April 25th, 2006 by User ImageJohn Dilbeck

I just created a new forum on a different community site and I’d like to invite you to come and share your success stories — large or small — with us.

I described why I started the forum and what I’m looking for over there.

How has positive attitude, persistance, planning, and effort attracted the results you want in your life?

Come and share:

Success Stories Forum

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Category: Forums, Musings | No Comments »