Vietnam Urban Forum

Archive for July, 2010

Getting exposure for your business is a beautiful thing. And using article marketing to get it is not only beautiful, it’s simple, easy and affordable.

Just be warned — you’re gonna get a lot of email! When your first article goes out, expect a bunch of emails to come flying in.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing! All of those emails indicate that your articles are getting out in the world, and the wheels are in motion to propel your business into greater success.

The Headwaters of the Email Flood

The first emails you will get are from mailing lists, asking you to confirm your membership. The article distribution services that send out your articles will automatically sign you up for mailing lists, user groups, and forums when you submit an article. These are the places your article will be distributed.

When you receive confirmation emails from these lists, forums, and groups, make sure to confirm them, and be quick about it. If you do not join, your articles will not be sent to those places. That is lost opportunity.

Joining increases your exposure. The more places you are published, the more links you will receive. This means increased site traffic and an increased number of backlinks to your site. As you gather more and more quality backlinks, you’ll see your rankings on Google climb higher and higher.

A Little Time Now Is Worth a Lot!

Each email confirmation takes roughly 20-30 seconds. In the scheme of things, thirty seconds is just a blip on the radar. Imagine how long it would take to utilize some of the more traditional marketing methods. While article marketing requires a small time commitment up front, it will soon begin to run itself, leaving you to tend to other aspects of your business.

Make sure to confirm these requests as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more time that is wasted with your article floundering around, waiting to be distributed. Make a habit of going through these emails at least once a day. Not only will this get your articles out faster, it will prevent you from getting overwhelmed with a weeks worth of mailing list confirmations. Get them off your plate as soon as possible and you’ll see a greater return rate of positive results.

The Best Ways to Manage Your Mail

First, set up a separate article marketing email account. This will keep your personal life separate from your company separate from your article marketing campaign. You’ll find things are much easier to manage when you funnel all of the mailing list requests into one email box.

Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! all offer free email accounts. It takes a matter of seconds to set up an account and it’ll save you oodles of time in the long run. You’ll be happy to know that all of your article marketing business will be organized on one account, not to be confused with the rest of your inbox contents.

Keep The Decks Clear

As you become a member of all these great mailing lists, you’ll be on the list to receive emails from others on the list. And, unless you set up your email to prevent it, you’ll end up with a LOT of mail.

You can avoid inbox overload all together by properly setting your email options. In fact, you can set your mailing options to allow you to read messages from the groups online. Not only will this keep your inbox from overflowing, it’ll make it easier for you to accept each mailing list. And you’ll still have access to all that great content from other authors on your lists.

While article marketing requires a little of your time in the initial phases, you’ll see the results return more business to you than most other marketing methods. Invest a little time in getting things going and you’ll be blown away by the results.

How would you like it if the visitors of your Adsense sites created FREE and ORIGINAL content for you? It’s possible and a lot easier than you think.

What is a Highly Optimized Forum?

There are a few important differences between a normal forum and one that is optimized for the search engines.

The problem with a normal forum is that spiders have a hard time crawling through them. This is because the pages of most forums aren’t normal .html pages. Most forums are PHP pages that have a lot of “junk” after them. This junk is actually a bunch of numbers (called a session id) that is assigned to a web site visitor and which is used to track the visitor’s path and the time of entry and exit.

For example, the URL of a typical forum URL might look like this:

http://www.domainname.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5&sid=dada710f34b2dcc1eb79ea

Obviously that isn’t the ideal situation if your goal is to get your forum indexed into the search engines.

Instead, you want your forum’s URL to look like this:

http://www.domainname.com/forum/keyword10.html

Why You Need a Highly Optimized Forum

There’s a way to optimize a forum in such a way that, every time someone posts a new forum topic, it actually creates a new html page.

This is a big deal because it’s like the members of your forums are creating keyword-rich content for you every day!

And if your forum become really popular, this means hundreds or even THOUSANDS of pages of content is created for you on a daily basis! All this content is free, original, and useful to your visitors!

Another great reason why we put a forum on all of our Adsense sites is because it differentiates our web sites from all the other Adsense sites on the Internet.

As we’ve mentioned in previous lessons, you don’t want to make your Adsense sites look like all the other “Made for Adsense” sites on the Internet. Some search engines are starting to ban web sites that look like they have no other purpose but to display Adsense ads.

Installing the Mod

First, what is a mod?

Mod is short for modification. A mod, as it refers to forums, is something that is typically created by the public that adds features that aren’t available in the original forum script.

But this mod isn’t a typical one. It doesn’t add any cool features or extras. In fact, it takes some away. But the important thing is the fact that it makes every topic in your forum its own optimized HTML page.

The mod is provided by Able2Know.com and can be downloaded at:

http://search.able2know.com/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?ID=5478&view=File

We have a video in the A/V Department that will show you how to install the mod. If you need any help, just post a message in our forum and we’ll give you a hand.

Growing Your Forum

Now that you have your Highly Optimized Forum installed, you have to get people to start posting in it!

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. The problem is, most people don’t want to post in an empty forum.

So here are 7 tips for jump-starting a new forum:

Post a prominent link. Make sure you post a big bold link on your front page of your web site that advertises your forum. You want to drive as much traffic to your forum as you can when you are first starting out. Nobody can post in your forum if they can’t find it…

Create some starter topics. You can get the ball rolling by creating a few “starter topics.” One way to get people posting is by asking a controversial question. For example, if you have a political forum, you could ask, “Should George Bush be impeached?” This will get people to post because a lot of your visitors will have an opinion since this is an easily debatable topic.

Let guests create topics. A lot of forums on the Internet require visitors to register before they can post. This seems to discourage a fairly large percentage of people from posting. Some people feel that it’s not worth the hassle of registering just to post a simple question or comment. That’s why we recommend giving guests the ability to start topics on your forum… at least until your forum grows larger.

Link to your forum from every article. Most Adsense sites have a lot of articles on them. It’s a good idea to post a link at the end of every article that says, “Discuss this article in our forum!” Your visitor will be more willing to go to your forum since they are done reading the article any way.

Limit the number of categories your forum has. A common mistake I see a lot of people make when they first start their forum is they have too many categories. For example, your forum could have a “General Discussion” as well as an “Off Topic” category. If you have too many, and people only post in a couple of them, your entire forum will look like a ghost town! Once your forum becomes popular, start adding more categories if you feel like it needs them.

Start a poll. Most forums (such as phpBB) have the ability to start polls. We’ve noticed that even people who don’t like to post at all in forums will at least answer a poll to find out what the results are.

Create fake posts. Okay, this tip is a little controversial and not everyone feels comfortable doing it… but it is an effective way to make your forum look less “empty”. You can create a few posts with fake names in order to make your forum look more popular than it is. This seems to work well because people are more likely to post in a forum if they see other people doing it too.

Your highly optimized forum is a valuable thing! Remember, every time someone starts a topic, that’s a new HTML page that can be indexed by the search engines!

Exactly how valuable is your forum? Well, I’ll put it this way… some people pay writers $20 or more for articles that they can post on their Adsense sites. Each topic to your forum is just as original, keyword-rich, and useful as any article on the Internet… and it’s completely free!

We love to chat about many things. People have different favorite topics to talk about. When you have a particular interest in mind, you look for those chats that will suit your needs best. If you like a mature chat, politics is definitely for you. Politics is a topic that many like to steer clear of. This is mainly because nothing conclusive emanates from it. It really does not matter where you are, politics will always spark different emotions. There are chats that have totally banned politics from discussions and there are those who specialize in political issues. There are very many chat forums which will host politics as their chosen topic of focus. Life is politics and, there is no way of avoiding it at some point in our lives. Therefore, the importance of politics cannot be underestimated. However, when you wish to engage in a political chat, there are several things that you need to consider. If you are chatting in chats where politics is common, there will be rules put in place to guide you. Therefore, the first thing before you engage in a political chat is to look at the rules.

Rules need to be followed for many reasons. It is through rules of a political chat forum that you will get to know what is acceptable and what is not. Just like a game, you need to know what to do so that you can gain as much as you can. In this case, rules will enable you know how to conduct it. Rules will also show you where trouble is and, you can avoid it. For example, you should never engage in personal attacks, you should never use insults to make your point heard and also you should never appear to demean any political figure or a figure in a different political context. In other words, rules are put in place to ensure that your conversations are mature. Criticism should be creative or constructive and, when you fully understand this, you are ready to conduct a political chat. Sometimes, politics seems to have no rules at all. It is difficult to establish the line which you should not cross. However, with proper adherence to rules, you should be in a position to chat appropriately.

A political chat should be based on honesty. You should avoid major propaganda. Also, you should not insight people or make people believe what you think. People you are chatting with will also have a keen interest in politics and chances are that they have their very own opinion. You should not be compelled to agree with anyone. Personal sentiments on politics will always differ to great degrees. You must know why you are chatting in the first place. Your aim might be to see what opinions of others are. You might also be looking for solutions. Also, chats will enable you understand some of the things you do not. Many minds have a way of dissecting issues and having a better or clearer understanding to issues. With the above tips on how to chat politically, you should have a mature chat.