The worst internet marketing mistake: Pay per Click, SEO and Forum Posting.

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The worst internet marketing mistake: Pay per Click, SEO and Forum Posting.

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The three top internet marketing techniques, pay per click, SEO and forum posting, each have advantages and disadvantages. Of course, you can make use of all 3 for the best results, but you need to avoid making mistakes that waste your time. This article will focus mainly on forum posting.

But let's take a quick look at the other two methods first: MISTAKE #1 Rely only on Pay per Click

Pay per click

It's quick and simple. You pay for every click that brings someone to your website. With the right keywords and the right offer, it can be very effective. It can also be very expensive, and with the wrong combination of keywords and offers, risky too. The bottom line is quick results and spending money. MISTAKE #2 Rely only on SEO

SEO

This can be a great big bag of worms. The right techniques can be very effective. Paying someone else to SEO your page could be effective, or it could be a waste of money... or worse. They could use bad techniques and end up reducing your presence in the search engines. It can be a long term, ongoing project, i.e., lots of time or lots of time AND money. The results are never sure.

The bottom line is unknown results and time, and spending money. Of course none of those disadvantages should keep you away from pay per click or SEO. But there are more effective marketing options that can offer you some of the benefits of both. MISTAKE #3 Rely on Forum Posting instead of Forum Participation

Forum Posting

The rest of this article will focus on "Forum Posting". Really, forum posting is a very bad idea in the way it seems to be most commonly practiced. It is generally ineffective and a waste of time. The effective way to use a forum for internet marketing is by forum participation! There is a significant difference between " posting " and " participation "; and that difference is no results or effective results!

A common method of forum posting is to pay someone to sign up with as many forums as possible and make a post something like this: " Check out this great website: [link] ". Sometimes a link isn't even used and only the url included as text in the message.

MISTAKE! There are numerous mistakes there: The topic of the forum often has nothing to do with the topic of the website being promoted The text "check out this great website" won't interest anyone in anything Not including a link , no one will cut and paste a url from a text message.
Including a link , the message is uninteresting and the link is probably out of context. No one will click. Any SEO benefits will be marginal at best

Just one of these mistakes would defeat all your efforts, but too many people make all the above mistakes at once!

Another common method is to post a message that appears to go with the discussion or forum topic with a link that is completely out of context . Here is an example from one of our forums (exactly as written):

Post title : Studying through online
Post category : Education, California
Mon Jun 21 07:48:20 2010
Poster : jenifer26 from San Diego, California

Is it possible to study a foreign languages like Hindi(Indian native language) through online just by staying here in US? If it is possible, kindly suggest me more about it.

* Sacrborough Junk Removal Services (link to: scarboroughdisposal.com)

Reply: jenifer26 from San Diego, California
Mon Jun 21 07:54:38 2010

online studies: It has been quite a long time that i wanted to learn a foreign language. It has been my pleasure to learn and know them. Are there any online studies regarding about this education? If so, kindly suggest.

* Sacrborough Junk Removal Services (link to: scarboroughdisposal.com)

Ok, do you see what's wrong there? First, the forum post and reply were made by someone with an IP address in India. So, it is easy to guess that Scarborough Junk Removal Services of Toronto, Ontario, Canada hired a company in India to do some forum posting for them. Not a problem if they are getting quality results. But in this case, look what they got!

There are so many mistakes made in this posting: Post category: Education, California . The website linked to is not about education, nor of interest to people in California. Something like, Business, Ontario would have been more appropriate. The post is titled "studying through online". Not much of an interest grabbing or English-wise correct title. That title would be marginally ok for a post about online education in California, but not for junk removal in Toronto! The post is about studying a foreign language. Again, the English is marginal at best, but it barely matches the post's title and isn't relevant to the website being promoted. The link is completely unrelated to the forum topic, post title, and post itself. There will be no benefit to the forum, the poster, the website, SEO or anything else. This post has been a complete waste of time and effort; for the person writing the post, for the company who's website is being promoted, for the forum, and for the readers of the forum! The poster followed up with a reply kinda pretending to answer the original post (with the same name and just 6 minutes later!), again with marginal English and a link to a completely unrelated website. I am not even going to mention that the poster made a spelling mistake in the link text for the company's website. Oops, I just mentioned it!

This posting was particularly strange because the forum she was posting in had a topic relevant to Ontario and the type of website being promoted! A suitable post could have been made in the same forum, but under that topic, speaking about junk removal! Why create a post about education to talk about junk removal?

A third type of forum posting involves a well written self promotional piece about a website, that is then repeatedly posted as a reply to every message on a forum. Be it related or not. This will completely turn off any human reader of the forum and probably get the poster banned from the forum and all his messages deleted!

A fourth type of forum posting is like the above, but posted once or twice. I refer to this as URL dropping . Someone comes to a forum once and makes a post with their URL and never returns. Sure you'll get a link and it might be a plus point for your SEO, but it won't produce nearly as beneficial results as offering some relevant interaction after you drop your URL in the forum.

See related article: How to use forum posting for effective self promotion.

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