Following and commenting on forums is a way to both keep up with what is going on in a niche and get some backlinks at the same time. It is also a way to socialize and make oneself known among people with related interests. However, forums do take valuable time but finding the right ones will make time spent on them much more effective. Here are some methods to make finding the perfect forums easier.
Before getting into any forums, remember that spamming with thoughtless comments and blatant self-promotion will lead to one being ignored at best and banned at worst.
A nice thing about forum commenting is that finding forums does not require any expensive software and can be done through a regular search. Simply type the following in a search engine:
- “your niche keyword(s)” forum (try both with and without quotation marks)
For example, a search for a forum on “search engine optimization” would look like this:
search engine optimization forum
It is also possible to find good forums using names of popular software that most are run on Examples of the most used ones are below. Note the vBulletin is paid and perhaps the best software.
- “Powered by vBulletin” your niche keyword(s)
- “Powered by SMF” your niche keyword(s)
- “Powered by phpbb” your niche keyword(s)
- “Powered by PunBB” your niche keyword(s)
- “Powered by IPB” your niche keyword(s)
Therefore, the same search example given above would look like this:
“Powered by vBulletin” search engine optimization
Filtering to get the best forums
The results given in searched will likely need to be filtered and narrowed down. For example, many people will want sites offering “follow” links in order to get more juice from search engine rankings, or only want forums that rank high in search engines. The free Firefox browser has a lot of good plugins that can help with this task. One of the best is SEO Quake, which gives lots of information about sites on the search results page to include page rank and if the site is nofollow. http://www.seoquake.com/
Forum search engines
Another way to find forums is to use search engines dedicated to forum searches. The following are some of the top search engines for this purpose, although some of them contain message boards and other sites that are not strictly forums.
http://boardreader.com/
http://omgili.com/
http://www.boardtracker.com/
Regardless of how the forums are found, look for ways to select the best ones. Examine each forum individually for interesting topics. A look at the number of threads and the most recent posts will give a good idea of how active it is. A forum with little recent activity may not be worth signing up with. In addition, a good forum will have some kind of moderation and will not allow blatant advertising.
