My buddy the BigBadWolf wants to get more active forum members to his horror comics forum

I was sitting around feeling epigramatic so I wrote something like this:

You can publicize posts.

Basically you can design posts to be marketed and then do so. You build links to the posts, by finding other places to link it. This is often done in entertainment niches by concocting “news” or the upcoming release of a new product and giving plenty of images. Then when you draw people to these existing posts, you try to give them something colorful to click on off to the side as well as a nice message inviting them to register and explore your boards. BigBad does a good job with the latest posts of his forum available from the front page and he has lots of appealing content. So if the visitors get there, I’m pretty sure it would convert.

You can build links to the forums.

I offered to do this for him. I have a pretty good feel, better than the average SEO fo where to get links from in this area and how to make them stick. There are good ways to find quality boards to post on. And there are known methods for searching google to find quality backlinks

For the most part link building forums are a pile of sheep poop. Nobody wants to give away their tricks in this area. She will spam you until your ears bleed (its not spam but its an agressive off-topic newsletter) but Michelle MacPhearson offers a really useful social media checklist, that has a lot of good places to get links that will give you ideas of your own. It’s a good idea to keep a hosted public presence where you can throw links at, including links of other things you like. You can do this with del.icio.us, you can do this with a Google Reader Shared Page - it’s like a linkblog.

You can make a video the next time you go to a con.

BigBadWolf is awesome about going to the all the major horror events on the east coast and promoting his site. To me, thats where the real value is, where he gets out and has potential audience members right there. You’ll get a pretty good conversion rate from telling people about your web site in person. A way to extend that is with video. It doesn’t have to be expensive, I got a flip video camera for christmas. Which is the coolest thing in the world. All you need is 1 interview to make a useful video for site promotion. There are tons of indie horror comic artists and writers who frequent Comic Monsters.

You can take the pictures you’ve taken at events and you can create a flickr stream. There are automatic uploaders for this that are free, but its easy enough to do.

Specifically, Flickr uploader - Flickr can have huge giant effects on your traffic, but even if what you have is pretty vanilla, Flickr can be a part of your SEO strategy

You can give me the URLs for any rss feeds that you can currently make for the forums, and I will see if we can do something for them.

Basically an appealing feed can be marketed anywhere

Do you have a comic monsters myspace page? Facebook? You could pimp out one or both.

This is about traffic not seo. I could give a fig about my search engine rankings, if I have people showing up.

You could try to banner exchange with other sites, and do that instead of putting adsense under the second post.

You might need OpenAds to do this, but even I can install and run OpenAds I think this makes good sense for forums because forums always have a lot of cool graphics in the sigs, and I think a kickass banner to a relevant audience is always a good idea. You can even pick up some good links by holding a banner contest, a good link and a great graphic for a low price.

Could you work with any of these insiders comic book publishers to sell products on the web? Do any of these companies have cafe press stores?

CafePress is kind of a boilerplate boring suggestion for most people. Nobody wants your URL on a hoodie but BigBad’s site is full of really vibrant art for horror fans. Some of that stuff is possibly marketable. Also, he could engage his forums to help him design a t-shirt or something to commemorate the next big event. CafePress stores are also excellent places to drop links.