LAST EDITED ON Oct-13-08 AT 04:31 PM (PST)
First, please read this thread at the Warriors:
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/17233-your-blog-google-within-minutes.htmlThe summary version is that by posting to your blog on the Warrior Forum, you more or less get the authority / trust of the entire forum behind your blog for search purposes.
Here is some followup & additional info on that:
We all know about participating in forums related to our niches as one form of traffic generation.
Extending the concept from the thread above - if you market to niches, you can focus in on forums that have a blog option for members available. That way, you can get the authority & trust of a domain in your niche market behind your niche blog posts.
Obviously you need to contribute useful content - don't spam, don't blatantly advertise, all the usual caveats. Be sure to look for forums with enough visitors, members, inbound links, etc. to make it worthwhile. Also make sure the domain has some age to it & is well spidered & currently active.
I haven't worked with Vbulletin in over a year, and I didn't realize that a member blog option was available. Once the Warrior Forum switched over to vBulletin and I saw the blog option, I started testing this idea on some niche forums, and so far it seems to be working well. I've seen results much the same as mentioned in the original thread at the Warriors.
This certainly shouldn't replace your own sites & blogs, since you really have no control over others' forums. It's just one more traffic generation method that seems to work pretty well. Just as with other search-based traffic generation, proper keyword selection is very helpful.
I don't know which other forum software offers member blogs, but you can find vBulletin forums by searching in Google this way:
keyword 2008 inurl:blogs "powered by vbulletin"
Be sure to search using the quotes as shown. The inurl:blogs is there to find forums that allow blogs, and the 2008 is in place to try to get forums that have been recently active. Be sure to change that sometime next January!
Here's an example for "gardening":
"gardening" 2008 inurl:blogs "powered by vbulletin" - Google Search
Here's another for "wedding":
"wedding" 2008 inurl:blogs "powered by vbulletin" - Google Search
You could also try searching for "bride" and "bridal" instead of wedding.
There are other ways to phrase searching for vBulletin too, but those should provide a good start.
Now for some of the ideas & strategies left unsaid at the Warriors:
I'm just going to throw out an idea off the top of my head here - let's imagine that we're in the gardening niche.
So we start a bunch of member blogs on several established gardening-related vBulletin forums. Hopefully that will get us some search traffic and some direct visitor traffic from that same forum (since they're all interested in our niche already).
Here's the other nice thing - each of those blogs has an RSS feed. What if we were to take our RSS feeds from those blogs, and mix & match them with Scrubz? Maybe add them in to the blackhole feed strategy?
This is the kind of repurposing of content that Kurt has always encouraged. I'm sure he will think of even more ways to run with this concept!
Jeff