Become a regular contributor within niche forums to be seen as an authority

Become a regular contributor within niche forums to be seen as an authority

Becoming a regular contributor does take time, which is why this won't appeal to many people, but the payoff is tremendous.  You could be the "go-to guy" if you become known for your SEO knowledge, your sales knowledge, branding experience, or whatever it is you do and talk about on the forums you're targeting.  Think about it, if you're on a forum dedicated to birds and someone comes across your post about "How to build a website dedicated to birds," they will likely contact you if they are interested in doing just that.

Niche forums are pretty amazing when it comes to lead generation, but the leads tend to trickle in. This is due to the amount of traffic on the forums, what people are interested in, and if they're willing to pay you for your services. 


Find niche-specific forums and help users
This isn't the most difficult thing to do because you go to Google, or whatever search engine you prefer, and type in "(your niche) forum" and see what pops up.  You'll likely get some on the first page but don't be afraid to dive ten pages deep to find smaller forums with a dedicated user base

Register on as many forums as you can, set up your signature if possible, and start commenting and posting away.  You might need to hit certain goals before you can utilize your signature, but these goals tend to be easily achievable so don't worry if it takes you a couple of days and a couple of dozen posts lol.

Don't know what a signature is?  Well, it's a place that shows up under every post and can have your banner or a link with some text explaining more about yourself.  It's similar to a signature you see on blog posts that talk about the writer but with forums, it's a place to advertise your own stuff.


Never drop a link to your website within your comments
When you're starting your niche forums reputation accumulation (fancy wording there), you will want to make it look like you're commenting to help others and not yourself.  Your end goal is to help yourself by funneling people to your site, but you can't make it look that way, so you can never drop a link to your own website when commenting early on.  After you've accumulated enough trust, which you need to determine on your own, you can drop a link to your own websites but don't rush this.

You will be able to place links for bigger websites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Wikipedia, etc. since people will understand these are not your websites and you're not sharing to get traffic.  I would advise sharing high authority sites like this when it pertains to the original post, so you can show you're not afraid to share a link and you're not biased to a specific website.  You're simply sharing information that anyone can benefit from

Never argue over small details within a post
Whenever you start an argument online, it never ends well.  When you think you've won the argument, you've lost, and that's because you were fighting with someone in an open forum for anyone to read.  People will see this, look at your signature, and probably avoid your websites in the future because they now think you're mean and easily angered.

Never ask a question but always answer them
You need to be the authority and that means you need to know everything.  If you don't know an answer to a specific question, never "wing it" when answering, because this could come back to bite you in the back end.  If you're unsure of something, do a little research, and then answer the questions for someone.  The more questions you answer, the more authority you'll gain, and that means the easier it will be to drop a link of your own later on to siphon traffic


Final Thoughts,
There are plenty of people, "Niching Down" when it comes to SEO services, Web design, and various other digital services.  This is because they know it's easier to sell an SEO service to a mechanic if your website is tailored to all mechanics.  Now, we know this doesn't mean much when it comes to SEO because we swap out the URLs, keywords, anchors, etc. and build a custom plan of attack for each website, but the customer doesn't know that, and that's why they gravitate towards niche-specific SEOs and Designers.  The same goes for these niche forums and that's why you should be active on them.  You can create a niche-specific service, advertise it within your signature, and become active on all the forums you can find so they are more likely to pick you over the next guy

Thanks for reading

Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey