Challenge: Can You Stump Business and Blogging?

I know you’re going to read it and then tell me it was not about gas stations needing blogs, but about the benefits of blogging for any and every business. My argument is that this post is absurd and misleading in its self-serving logic. (Of course a site that generates ad revenue based on content for business blogging would say every business needs a blog!) I know the piece was meant to be fun and attract traffic, but this was just over the top. I would also not take such offense if I didn’t see this same sentiment echoed by 95% of the web developers and marketing professionals out there. To combat this problem, and to help the non-tech people just looking for advice on marketing their business and their website, I offer this:

Every business does not need a blog!

As I have written before, there are many reasons why some people should not have a blog. To elaborate on this with the gas station owner:

Writing skills are important.

Many gas station owners, especially in this area, either don’t speak English, speak English as a second language, or lack the writing skills of a professional writer. Running a gas station requires good management skills, but not necessarily good written and oral skills. If you do not speak English fluently or do not write well, your blog is not going to be a strong marketing piece for your company.

Blogging is not cost-effective in this niche.

Which of these takes less time and costs a gas station owner less:

• Setting up and maintaining a blog, or
• Putting out a sign on the corner with prices and specials?

I’m going to make an educated guess in saying the sign is also more effective as well.

This niche has already been done.

Do you think the local gas station will have more internet marketing power than Yahoo! Answers, AAA, or About.com? There is just no way my local gas station is going to surpass the power of a search engine or a social media site.

Conversions and traffic are not guaranteed.

After composing his posts, the gas station owner would then have to spend time building traffic to his site … so now he is spending time marketing both his blog online and his company offline. All of this effort does not mean any of his stumbling-in readers will convert to regulars to build trust, nor does it mean his blog readers will convert to sales at the pump. In fact, I’d guess that the conversion rate from first-timers to regulars, and from readers to gas-purchasers, is pretty low in this scenario.

Gas stations are local businesses.

Very few people will drive more than a mile or 2 out of their way to fill up their gas tank, and it usually has to be quite a deal to be worth it. Having a blog will not attract customers to your station from 3 cities over. What are the odds that people living in your immediate area will find your blog through Google, become a regular reader, and then start using your station instead of their regular one?

Gas stations don’t require experts.

It’s gas, not rocket science—the station provides it and you put it in your car. Many people don’t even know who works there or owns the station because they just pay at the pump and drive off.

The proposed questions can be found on Yahoo! Answers.

Most single-topic quick-answer types of sites don’t have long-term readers or regulars.

Running a gas station is time-consuming.

When the owner is not running his business, do you think he’d rather be home blogging or spending time with his family? My husband works long hours, and I know that thinking about work is the last thing he wants to do when he gets home.

Your Opinion?

What do you think? Do gas stations need blogs? Can every business benefit from having a blog?

Update

The discussion has been continued over at Business and Blogging and the StartupNation Community. Follow the links for direct access.

It’s not about writing for search engines or links or anything else. You write for people.

If you’d like to learn more about what I mean by that, check out the recently released podcast I did on using content and code to market your website. You can also read the discussion that came out of it.

• Find the courage to ask.
  LeBron wasn’t afraid of asking how to get into the meetings of a top investment firm, leading him to contacts he would have not found by other means. I have started several business relationships by having the courage to step up and ask when others sat on the sidelines. If you never get out on that limb, you’ll never know if you can fly!
• Unity is better than focusing on the individuals.
  At LeBron’s summit, his team told the participants that they were there to see how King James Inc. and the invited endorsers can work together to promote the LeBron James brand for mutual benefit. The goal should not be to see what each could get out of the party, but to see how everyone can increase revenues by working as a team. This is an important concept to remember when you are forming B2B partnerships or networking.
• Surround yourself with the best people.
  Sure, LeBron’s team consists of his three buddies that didn’t know anything about building an empire before they came on board with LeBron. But what they did was learn from the best—they had advisors from top firms, first-rate accountants, and "financial world superstars" on their Rolodex. While your start-up may not be able to afford the kind of counsel that LeBron gets, you can still hire the best people and surround yourself with quality.
• The brand is bigger than the man.
  LeBron realizes that he is only one person, and his career will only be so long. By building an entire brand around himself and using solid financial strategy, LeBron is setting himself up for a career that extends beyond the NBA. His team’s concern with market polling and international image allows LeBron to create a version of himself that stands out from his peers and the problems they have had. This principle is true whether you’re an international superstar or the hero at your local mall: When you run a company with your name on it, the brand is some version of yourself that is highly edited and not quite complete but works from a marketing standpoint.
• Diversify your income streams.
  LeBron isn’t just relying on one stream of income through basketball. He has created equity partnerships in a wide variety of companies including MSN, Nike, Coke, Cannondale, and even a new internet venture. By spreading the interests of King James Inc. across various markets and keeping up with changing consumer trends, LeBron is insuring himself against market and income fluctuations. While specialization is great to help your company excel at one thing (such as LeBron does with basketball), it is not enough to give you a cushion against changes in market interest and consumer behavior (such as a drop in the popularity of a sports star or declining viewship in the sport). Diversifying your income streams and anticipating future consumer trends will ensure your business has longevity.

I’m not the biggest basketball fan—give me football any day!—but I have to agree with Warren Buffett that "King James" is the one to watch in the future, and I’ll be keeping track of his business dealings closely.

Being Different

Celebrating your differences in your market is the basis for the creation of a unique selling proposition (or unique selling point) and the formation of a point of difference for your product. It is impossible to know how to brand your company if you don’t have a clear vision of what you offer, why it is different from others who may offer similar concepts or products, and how to convey all of this to your customer.

Why is being different important? Being different is important because not everyone does it—not everyone puts "be remarkable" into their business plan. Many people can open a chain store, a coffee shop, or provide web design services that are just the same as hundreds of others out there. What makes you unique is putting in the extra effort and showing the initiative to make yourself different. It is about finding your niche and being best in the world at something, whatever your version of the world may be. You can use branding to make yourself stand out even when you are selling the same home care products as 100 other women in your city, cater to a specific audience when creating your content online, or provide the greenest dry cleaning service with the best customer service in all of Cleveland. The point is that you have to be different to stand out in a crowd, because doing the same thing as everyone else will never bring you the success you want.

How should you go about being different? Try some of the examples I have outlined below:

#1 Develop a recognizable and consistent voice

Being different doesn’t mean you have to constantly change. For example, my husband used to frequent a pizza shop regularly before we were married. The owner knew all the regulars and often served them himself. He also sponsored local youth sports which then brought in business from their aftergame parties at the pizza place. This kind of predictability and personal service brought customers back time and time again to watch sports, consume food, and play video games. The food there was OK, the beer selection was minimal, and the TVs weren’t huge, but that pizza shop offered a very unique selling point that created regulars that brought a consistent cash flow to the business. When that owner left, a new one came in who didn’t have that personal connection or that feeling of comfortable predictability—and all of the regulars soon left to another establishment that did. Without the personal touch and reliability of the original owner, the business itself faded. What the new owner lacked was a "recognizable and consistent voice" to keep the business going after the handoff, and what the pizza place lost was essentially the heart of the business.

How can you keep and maintain a consistent voice while your business grows? The key is to put yourself into the business, as it is easiest to maintain when it is natural. Which gets me to point number two:

#2 Put yourself into your business

When you are an entrepreneur, what usually makes your business different is you. You bring everything you do into the company to make it what it is—your passion, your skills, your talent, your ideas, and your unique spin to a solution for a current problem in the world. I am my company. I even gave the company my initials! I know there is a frequent debate among small business owners working "on their company" vs "in their company", but I will always be the kind of person who works in my company. My personal handling of every customer is not unlike the pizza story above, but it does limit me in terms of the number of clients I can take on. If personality is important to your service business, then quantity over quality might be important as well. Consider how many clients you can logically handle, and then consider the pros of taking more (potential income) vs the cons of losing that personal touch (losing income).

#3 Develop your own style

I have always stressed the importance of personal branding, both with my clients and on this blog. Your personal style as the business owner shines through in everything you do, from your business card, to how you conduct yourself while spreading the word about your company, and how your business operates on a daily basis. Your own style is what makes your business different, because no one in the world is like you. I see a lot of small businesses trying to hide their uniqueness by setting up a false "big company look" complete with auto-attendents and phone services that will chase you around. Except in a few rare cases, you shouldn’t try to be something you’re not—be yourself and let your small business pride shine through. If your potential customer wants a big business, that is where they will go, so it is important to be honest and let your visitor decide that right from the start.

#4 Use imagery in a unique way

In my special for StartupNation, "5 Steps to Marketing Your Website", I discussed the use of imagery in marketing your site. This imagery doesn’t have to stop with your website—bring it to your store, your uniforms, or your marketing materials. You could try:

• Hiring a local painter to create permanent or seasonal murals on your walls or windows.
• Provide creative or fun uniforms for your staff, or let them express their own styles.
• Creating catchy fliers, business cards, and advertising pieces.

Why stop with the graphic arts? You could use the power of mental imagery in your business as well. Who would forget singing waiters or cashiers that always remembered to give balloons out to customers with kids?

#5 Break with tradition

Let’s revisit that pizza parlor. You may be thinking, "How can she use a pizza story to tell us to stay the same, and yet use the same example as a reason to ‘break with tradition’?" The answer is simple: Personal service is breaking with tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live). In every city, you can find plenty of pizza chains, fast food joints, and other institutionalized eating establishments—but finding a single owner with a single store who knows his customers is a rare treat that you can’t find at Little Caesar’s or Papa Murphy’s. For most of the establishments in this area, "tradition" is chasing trends, so doing things "the old-fashioned way" is actually breaking with tradition. If you’re not a pizza joint, you can be the only cafe that offers old-fashioned Italian sodas instead of just offering staples like Coke and Pepsi, the only drug store that also carries a selection of locally-made seasonal items for the family, or the only hardware store that sells goods and services by employing retired professionals to teach how-to classes.

Good customer service, a quality product, and value for your customers never goes out of style. Let others chase fads—you can often differentiate with yourself by keeping some traditions alive.

Additional Resources

• How to Create Your "Unique Selling Proposition" (USP) from Interactive Marketing in Bend, OR
• Your Unique Selling Proposition from Business Owner’s Toolkit
• Your Unique Story Proposition from CopyBlogger
• Term definition: Unique Selling Proposition (USP) from Entrepreneur.com

Reader Question

What makes you different? How have you capitalized on that?

How You Can Track Campaigns

These same methods can be used with any link campaign which is not hosted on your own site and which you are not able to see the statistics for:

• Use Referring Pages (easy)
  Install Google Analytics on your site according to their instructions. In your analytics dashboard, click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Referring Sites". In the listing of referring sites, click on "craigslist.org" (or whatever site you are getting traffic from) and you will get a listing of what pages the clicks are coming from. If you don’t see the site you are looking for on the list, it means you have not received any clicks from that site.
• Use Landing Pages and Stats (medium)
  Set up a special landing page for your campaign that will only be used for that campaign, like
  http://www.yoursite.com/craigslist-ad-0237485.html
  In your ad, link to that page. Then use your site’s stats program to see how many people landed on that page.
• Use Databases and PHP (hard)
  Set up a database to collect hit counts on your server. (I’m not going to explain how to do that here, so if you need help, you’ll have to consult a pro.) Using PHP or another programming language, write a script that will add a count in the database every time someone hits your front page based on a campaign number. Then, when you create your add, append that campaign number to your URL in the ad. For example, your URL might look like
  http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?campaign=20
  and that would put a line in your database that said one hit from campaign number 20.

Tracking page views for your ad is a little more tricky. If you’d like to track page views, I suggest making an image that only appears in one ad at a time, even if it is just a 1px by 1px invisible gif. Link that image from your site in your ad, and then you can use your web hosting server’s logs to determine how many times that one file was downloaded. This will give you an approximate number of page views for your ad.

Why You Should Track Campaigns

Tracking your campaign has many benefits, including:

• Testing Content
  You can set up multiple pages with variations on wording to see which type of ad gets the most clicks and determine the most effective wording.
• Tracking Campaign Effectiveness
  Putting up and monitoring ads takes time and effort, so it’s important to know which ads and advertising sources are worth your time.

What is Behavioral Marketing?

According to Wikipedia, behavioral marketing "is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. The idea is to observe a user’s online behavior anonymously and then serve the most relevant advertisement based on their behavior. Theoretically, this helps advertisers deliver their online advertisement to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them." In English, it means that you are followed around the internet using cookies and displayed ads according to your actions, so you are likely to get airline ads if you are searching for information on popular vacation destinations.

Availability

While contextual marketing programs (such as Google’s AdWords) are widely available, behavioral marketing is only offered by a handful of companies. The two main players offering behavioral targeting are Tacoda and Revenue Science. I have also heard that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in the process of experimenting with beta versions as well. All 4 companies do or will offer an ad network in which you can advertise in. The problem is that in order for behavioral targeting to truly work, you need to advertise on a larger site with a lot of areas of content, or you have to advertise across a network of sites where a user can be tracked across multiple sites. This leaves out the smaller niche sites which many users prefer over the larger portal sites because the smaller sites have more relevant content, and eliminates any long tail marketing efforts.

Costs

Along with the need for advertising on larger sites, you have greater costs. On a cost-per-thousand basis (CPM), you can advertise on many niche sites at rates of around $2-10 per thousand impressions. With the lower traffic counts on niche sites, you may only get one to five thousand impressions per month, therefore keeping your monthly advertising buget under $50 per month. With a larger site however, you could be paying $20-50 CPM on a site that gets 10,000-100,000 hits a month. The difference in advertising costs may not be worth it for your small business just to get 15% more people to pay attention to your ads (Source: eMarketer/Revenue Science).

To compare this with pay-per-click systems, you would have to consider the cost of the chosen keyword. With a lower-cost keyword, a properly written ad, and an excellent landing page, you could be making sales for as low as 5-10 cents per lead. For a high-cost keyword, that number could move up to $5-10 per lead. But you are still only paying for the number of clicks on your ad, not for the high percentage of people who don’t click on ads.

Privacy Concerns

Behavioral targeting is invisible to the end-user, which has raised many concerns about privacy. Many users don’t want to have their information stored and tracked so that they can be delivered ads, or they would at least like to know if a site is engaging in this kind of technology. With current internet privacy scares, end-users might worry about what data is collected and how that data is used, especially when shopping online with a credit card. As privacy groups make these issues into front-page news, engaging in behavioral targeting may create a negative association for your business.

Other Concerns

As with any campaign, you would have to follow your behavioral marketing campaigns closely to gage the user’s conversion rate. While some advertisers have had success with behavioral marketing, others have gotten poor-quality leads that don’t end with a sale.

Behavioral targeting may also be ineffective on computers with multiple users, or for single users with multiple roles. Consider these example in which behavioral targeting would be ineffective, but contextual targeting would work:

• Dad likes fishing sites, and he often does searches for fishing-related gear. These searches go into his history for behavioral targeting. But what if his teenage son gets on the computer and goes to a site for snowboarding? If that site featured behavioral targeting, the teen would be served fishing-related ads. If the site featured contextual advertising or direct buy ads, the teen might be served ads for snowboarding gear or video game systems.
• Suzy works at home as a virtual assistant. She has several clients that she performs various tasks for. For one, she books travel plans. For another, she researches trends in aftermarket car accessories. For yet another, she tracks certain stocks. She might be served behaviorally targeted ads based on these 3 factors, and yet she has no interest in any of these things and would not click on the ads.

When you are looking at behavioral targeting on larger sites, you also have to consider how many sales you can actually handle. For example, NHG Consulting wouldn’t advertise on a large site because, as a service business, we couldn’t handle the influx of clients without radically changing our business model. Businesses that serve local markets, service-based business, and businesses that sell hand-made goods are all examples of poor candidates for large-scale advertising. Finding the money to place an ad on MSN.com might net you a great ROI, but can your company handle a sudden surge of sales and be able to deal with 1,000 more clients in a month? If not, the negative reviews of the company because of poor service would hurt you more in the long run than any gains made by the immediate rush of sales.

Additional Resources

• Behavioral Marketing 101: Defining the Terminology
• Behavioral Marketing Usage Up 60%
• Behavioral Targeting (at Wikipedia)
• The Behaviorally Targeted Ad Audience
• Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites
• How Marketers Hone Their Aim Online
• How to Target
• The Internet Marketing Long Tail Bashes the "80:20" Pareto Principle
• Microsoft wants its piece of behavioral marketing pie
• Net Users Favor Niche Travel Sites
• Put Targeting Control in Users’ Hands
• When Does Behavioral Fail?
• The Wrong Tale: A Checklist for Long-Tail Implementations
• Yahoo Sees Salvation in Behavioral Targeting

In Closing

Behavioral targeting is a great technology with many applications, but it may not be right for small business owners. For our readers, do you use behavioral marketing as a part of your marketing plan? Why or why not? If you use it now, are you getting good results? If not, would you consider it in the future?

This is the third installment of our three-part series on building your traffic after your website launch. In case you missed it, you can go back and review Part 1 on using forums to boost your PageRank, and Part 2 on using e-mail to build traffic.

Why press releases?

When I was doing contract work for 4INFO, every time they did a press release or a reporter quoted them in a business journal, there was a huge jump in traffic to the site. A press release is not only a traffic builder in itself, but it allows for journalists and reporters to find your company and include you in their stories. When journalists need an expert to quote for an article, they turn to press releases to find one. If the topic of your business is hot, a quote by one journalist could lead to a domino effect. A few years ago, I was quoted on MSN.com in an article – and within a year, Google reported 94 other places I had been quoted on the same topic. That is considerable marketing for something that was free!

Writing a Press Release

I am not going to go into exact detail about a press release here, as you can find a few guides on writing them (including templates!) at the links below. In short detail, you create a catch heading, sum it all up in the top paragraph, support your announcement with some other details, tell people how to contact you or find more information, and then close by telling people about your company. It has been said that a press release represents an upside down triangle, with the big headline at the top and all the details trickling in below.

What should press releases be written about? Good topics are business launches, product launches, new partnerships, expansions, product teasers, and redesigns/repackages.. Some are better than others, but you can get an idea of the things people release by reading through the releases at PR NewsWire. While announcing your new ventures is great, you should limit your releases to no more than one or two per month. You don’t want to flood the market!

Press Release Sites

Once you have written your press releases, where do you submit them? Some of the larger press release houses can cost you $500-1,000 per release! To help out the little guys, I have found some smaller press release databases that still have a significant PageRank:

• 24-7 Press Release
  Cost: $299 per release with multi-release pricing available
  PageRank: 6
• PR.com
  Cost: Free to upload release but advanced profile options available for $199-499 per year
  PageRank: 6
• Free Press Release Center
  Cost: Free to upload release with $2.99 per release upgrade option
  PageRank: 6
• ClickPress
  Cost: Free to upload release with paid upgrade options available
  PageRank: 6
• PR Leap
  Cost: Free to upload release with paid upgrade options available
  PageRank: 6
• 1888 Press Release
  Cost: Free to upload release with paid upgrad options available
  PageRank: 5
• E-Comm Wire (for E-Commerce news)
  Cost: Free
  PageRank: 5
• PR Zoom
  Cost: Free to upload release with paid upgrade options available for $95-399
  PageRank: 5

Additional Resources

• From PR NewsWire: Writing Tips, Six Simple Steps for Turning Your Company into a Heavily Quoted Source, Components of a Press Release and Additional PR Tools
• From PRWeb:
  Tips, Guidelines and Templates for Writing an Effective Press Release
• The Publicity Hound features a free newsletter on using press releases from Joan Stewart. She also offers courses, free tutorials, and seminars on getting publicity for your business.
• From Publicity Insider: How to Write a Great Press Release: A Sample Press Release Template

I hope you have enjoyed our 3-part series on traffic building after a site launch. Questions? Please feel free to leave a comment below!

Part 1 in this series discussed using forums and online communities to give yourself a traffic boost. In this installment, I will give you some ideas on how to use your e-mail and personal network to get your PageRank off the ground when you launch a new website.

Your Personal Network

Everyone has a network – it’s that circle of family, friends, colleagues, business contacts, alumni, and former employers that you have met along the way during your life. While I don’t like the idea of hitting up your friends for money, I do like the idea of using your friends to spread the word about your business. After all, who would be more enthusiastic about your current pursuit than those who love you the most?

The difference between spam and a good viral marketing email is your call to action. Calls to action are for direct marketing campaigns, so leave it out here. All you really want to do is announce your new business venture and spread your ideas so they can roam around e-mail servers everywhere. Keep it simple, keep it positive, and don’t forget to put your contact information and URL at the bottom of your email. I also add a line that says something like “Please feel free to forward this to a friend!” on the bottom.

After sending this to people in your address book, consider which mailing lists you could try sending your announcement out through. I belong to several mailing lists that I could make an announcement to, including my alumni group and several networking groups.

E-mail Signatures

A colleague of mine was selling some tickets to a sporting event on a local classifieds web site. When a purchaser contacted her, she replied back with her full business signature at the end. He bought the tickets – and went to look at her site, later contacting her about some work he needed done. The moral of this story is that you never know what might be a potential networking opportunity, so include your signature on all your correspondence.

Typically, an email signature consists of a short bit of data that is placed at the end of your outgoing emails. This usually includes your name and/or company name, and contact information such as your website, phone number and email address. In addition, you can put a short marketing blip such as a tagline, a link to a recent project, or perhaps something you currently have on sale.

E-mail Etiquette

The last thing you want to do when you are starting out is offend someone or chase people away, so follow these guidelines to prevent problems:

• Only send the email once.
  In your email, give people a way to sign up for future updates, but don’t automatically send monthly emails to people who didn’t ask for it.
• Limit the announcements to mailing lists.
  Most networking lists ask that you only make business announcements once a month or a certain number of times per calendar year.
• Remember the rules of copywriting.
  Don’t take up too much of other people’s time with wordy emails that they won’t want to read.
• Make your message clear, but not spammy.
  Avoid saying “buy now!” and having a call to action that asks for a purchase. Think of it more as an announcement or press release, and less of a sales pitch.
• Be polite.
  Remember that when you use your e-mail signature for all correspondence, you are attaching your business name to everything you send out. E-mail is not confidential! Your message could be forwarded all over the entire country within days, so think before you hit send. (You can’t take it back later!)

Hopefully this article has given you some good ideas on how to use e-mail to launch your business and build traffic. Stay tuned for our next installment, in which we will discuss press releases.

Now that your site is done and live, what is your next step? TRAFFIC! This article is the start of a 3-article series on kickstarting your site’s marketing – for free! Part one focuses on ideas to get customers knocking at your door once you are open for business by using forums. Part 2 is about networking and using your e-mail. Part 3 will discuss press releases and how to make one.

Why forums?

Joining online communities and posting in forums is a great way for you to start networking and talking about your business without the pressure of in-person networking (especially for you social-phobes out there). Forums give you the chance to prove yourself as a knowledgeable person in your field, and as a respected member of the community. Additionally, the high traffic nature of forums make them natural candidates for frequent Googlebot visits, which boosts the PageRank of your site (if you link to it) as well as provides some indirect marketing for you.

Find Forums to Join

The first step to using forums to generate traffic is to find potential forums to join. There are two types of forums to consider when creating your marketing plan:

1. Forums related to the topic of your business.
   Is your business selling beeswax-based beauty products? Then find forums relating to beauty, beekeeping, or natural products.
2. Communities unrelated to the specifics of your business.
   What hobbies and interests do you have outside the actual running of your business? You might want to join a mom’s business forum like the Work at Home Moms, an entrepreneur forum like StartupNation, or a hobby-based forum like the Civil War Reenactors Forum.

Using your business and your hobbies, make a list of potential forums by Googling your topic and adding the word "forum". For example, you could Google "beekeeping forum" if you are the person above who sells beeswax products.

Use Criteria for Efficient Time Management

If you jumped right in after section one and looked for available forums, you probably noticed that there are millions out there. How can you decide which ones would be the best use of your time? You can start by judging the list you created above against these criteria:

• Site traffic and frequency of posting.
  Give a greater priority to sites that have a higher traffic load. More traffic and frequent updates means that more people will see your message, and the Googlebot probably visits the site more often that it would visit a smaller site.
• Page Rank.
  Check a site’s page rank with this page rank tool, and order your list according to each site’s page rank. Make sure that you have at least a few sites on your list that are PR5 or higher; a couple of PR6 to PR9 sites are worth 20 PR1 sites.
• Use of signatures.
  Do not waste your time on sites that either don’t have signature capabilities, or that prohibit the use of company information and URLs in your signature.

Forum Etiquette

While there are many positive reasons to promote your new business and network through forums, I always remind clients of the downside. That is, everything you post online ends up on Google and could be read by potential new clients. Keep that in mind when you are posting in forums, and remember to stick to proper forum etiquette. This includes:

• Follow the rules of the forum.
  Read and abide by the site’s terms of use and posting policies.
• Don’t spam the forum.
  Do: Use your signature. Don’t: Blatantly spam the forum with wording and links designed to sell people something. Typical offenders start topics just for the sole purpose of linking to their latest product, reply to every thread in their area of interest with "Call me so we can talk more!" so that they can prospect directly through the forum, or reply to every thread with a marketing angle.
• Make sure your signature goes with the flow of the site.
  Look around to see if most people have signatures that are plain text, rich text (with live links), or banner advertising, and match your signature to the rest of them.
• Contribute to the community as a whole.
  Don’t just participate in threads you start – get involved in any thread you feel you can make a contribution to.
• Read first, and then jump in.
  Get a feel for the site by reading through some past threads. Once you have tested the waters, join in by introducing yourself and saying hi!
• Stay positive.
  Don’t get involved in flame wars online. Do reread every comment you make before posting, asking yourself, “Would I say this to someone in person?” to judge whether or not you should click commit on your response. Remember to maintain the same pleasant attitude you would take with your customers. Above all, conduct yourself in a professional manner.

Establish your Presence

Just like any interaction, you have the ability to set the tone from your very first post. Start out positive and make it your goal to always stay that way. If you have chosen your forums correctly, you will also have the ability to make a signature – a tagline that is attached to every post you make. Here are some guidelines I use for my own signatures:

• Keep it short and focused.
  Instead of "We sell designer handbags at a discounted price. We maintain warehouses in 5 locations, which allows us to ship to any destination quickly.", try "DesignerHandbags.com – Great prices, fast shipping!" (Review our copywriting article for some additional help in creating a tagline.)
• Use a link.
  Some boards allow you to use standard HTML in your signature, which means you can link to your site like this:
  <a href="http://yourdomain.com/yourpage.html">your link title</a>
  Others restrict you to BB Code, which means your link would look like this:
  [url=http://yourdomain.com/yourpage.html]your link title[/url]
  Test your signature by viewing one of your posts to make sure it works and displays properly.
• Change your signature regularly.
  Use your signature to announce specials or new products. I use mine to announce new site launches or link to recent blog articles. You can also use it to reflect current marketing campaigns. For example, if you were a culinary supply warehouse and your goal was to push grill supplies at the start of summer, your signature might go from "CulinaryDepot.com – Your first stop for all your kitchen supplies!" to "Ready for summer? Get your grill supplies and outdoor picnic items from CulinaryDepot.com".

Maintain your Presence

Posting regularly is important to maintaining your status in the community. When your business, marketing plan, offerings, etc. change direction, don’t forget to change your profile in the community to reflect your new status!

I hope this article has helped you to understand how you can use forums to give your own site a traffic boost. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s article, where we’ll discuss how to increase your traffic through networking and e-mail.