Following on from my post on forums it’s a natural progression to give some guidance on forum etiquette. After all, when blogging is such an important part of your life, the more ways you can use for spreading the word about your blog, the better. I think it’s important to stress a few points about posting in forums in general to help you with this side of the marketing and promotion and traffic building of your blog or site. It’s important to do it the right way and not to run afoul of forum moderators, or even possessive members.

First, I’ll take my last couple of words from the opening paragraph and expand on that a little.

Possessive members are those members of forums who have probably been around for a long time and see the forum in question as very much “their” forum. This is not a bad thing and is encouraged in forums because it makes for a tighter community spirit as the older and longer serving members will look out for their forum and will rush to the defence of any other old timer who is being flamed by a young upstart!

Ok, it sounds a little crazy, but people in a community, by nature will look out for each other.

This is, of course in addition to forum admin and moderators, who have the power to delete posts that break the rules of the forum and even ban offending members altogether.

Where does that leave you if you’ve just joined a forum with an older, “inner circle” of members like that?

Well, it doesn’t mean the forum is going to be hostile to new members. Quite the opposite, in fact. They welcome new members and wish them well and as long as you take things slowly and gradually merge into the forum rather than trying to bulldoze your way in, you’ll be accepted and will make some great friends.

So what do I mean about merging in slowly rather than bulldozing in with all guns firing?

Well, unlike other social network platforms, forums have some ground rules that all the members stick to and expect new members to do so as well.

Here’s how to do it totally the wrong way:

Sign up and make sure you’ve placed the URL to your website in as many of the boxes as you can in your profile and also fill your sig with a load of affiliate links as well.

Post your first message in any category you like (hey, it doesn’t matter, does it?). In that first post, use your best hyped up sales pitch and tell everybody they “really must visit the site below ’cause it’ll make them rich overnight” and place a link to your business opportunity or affiliate link.

Then copy the message and post it again all over the place for good measure - hey, you want everyone to see it, after all!

Then find a seasoned member’s post and rubbish it with as many defamatory remarks as you can think of and then start a new thread telling everyone how great you are.

Sound a little exaggerated? Maybe, but you’d be surprised at how often that sort of thing occurs in forums. Guess what happens to new members who do that sort of thing. Yep, they get their IP address logged, their membership banned and they lose a valuable resource for promoting their blog or site. If a forum owner is particularly strict, he’ll most likely also post your details around other forums to warn them to ban you as soon as you arrive. Guess what that’ll do to your credibility? Well, you might as well start looking through the classified employment pages of your local newspaper, because your online business prospects will have dropped through the floor, so you might as well get used to working 9 to 5 again!

On the other hand, here is the right way to do it:

Once you have signed up, read the rules of the forum before you post anything. Make sure you understand them - it’s important!

Introduce yourself in the appropriate place and wait for some of the other members to say hi. They will, don’t worry.

Read through the most recent posts and anything else that gets your interest and make a note of which members post the most often and the ones that give the most advice - these are usually the older and more experienced members and you want to get them on your side.

When you find a thread that interests you and that you know something about, go ahead and post a reply, making sure it is relevant and adds value to the thread. Posting a “yes, I agree with you” or “good point” is not good enough and will irritate older members. It adds nothing to the thread and is a waste of your time.

It’s tempting to get your number of posts up as quickly as possible in this way - don’t do it.

You should create your signature after your first post so that future posts will carry a legal link or more (however many the rules allow) that can link to your own site or blog and maybe an affiliate link too. Advice on this differs but my own preference is to only put links to my own sites. The reason being is that these links count as valuable one-way back-links to your site so each time you post a good, original and well written message with lots of content, the search engines will reward you for your trouble and it will count towards your eventual page rank from Google. Posting affiliate links merely gives that link love to the owner of the affiliate site, so you are doing all that work to boost their page rank and not your own. Also by adding a link to your own site, you are driving targeted traffic directly there where you can promote that affiliate program in a much better way.

When you start replying to topics with valuable information, you will quickly gain the respect of the other members who will most likely bring you into the conversation if your reply gets their attention (in the right way!)

After you’ve made a few good replies to other people’s threads and had some response back, you will have started to become accepted by the members. Now if you feel confident to start your own thread, go for it - if it’s a good one you’ll get lots of replies. You’re now an accepted member of the forum. Congratulations!

So there you have it, in a fair sized nutshell. How to conduct yourself as a new member in forums if you want to be accepted, by following the correct forum etiquette. More importantly you will enlarge and expand your social network in that direction, as well as giving more weight to your own promotion campaign.

All the best reasons for doing it the right way every time!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

Hello, if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Filed under: Blogging