Promote your forum with a Street Team

Set up a street team on your forum to help you get the word out about it. Setting up a street team is fairly simple.

Setting up the Street Team:

• Get the word out that you want members of your forums to help you promote it.
• Set up a board specifically for the team to discuss the various ways of promotion
• Set up a usergroup for the team that will allow them to have a few extra perks (bigger inboxes, larger avatars, etc. Though keep away from making them truly stand out. You don’t want people clicking through their links to find out they have been had).

Ways a Street Team can help promote

• Have them install the Alexa Tool Bar, though you should let them know it’s spyware… that way every time they visit the site they help up the ranking.
• Have them join social networking sites like Stumble Upon and Digg. It is important to note here that they need to stumble a lot more then just your forum of your site will likely end up on the banned list. The same applies to Digg. One of the extra things they can do here is to promote the sites that link to yours. Read more about this here: Promoting Links and Linkbait.
• Have them start basic pages on free sources like GeoCities or GooglePages. This sill provide additional links to your site and can generate some decent content if these pages are promoted through other means.
• If any of them are good with graphics then they can help to make new banners for the forum that the rest of the team can use to in their promotion, like placing them in sigs and their created pages.
• Have them join a few related forums. They can link to your forum via their signatures and can post related content that can link back to your articles. Tweak this out by reading the previous point. Have them follow the rules I give in this article: Link Building with Forums as it’s important that they are not coming across as spammers so they can continue to post on the other forums.
• Get pens made with the site url on them and send boxes of them to the members of the team. They can then leave the pens at grocery stores so people will borrow them when they need to write a check. This can potentially spread your site all around several busy towns and cities.
• Have them read related blog feeds so they can make comments about related threads on your forum. Again, make sure they are not spamming the blogs as no one likes a spammer. I give a few posting tips here: Link Building with Blog Commentsand again, check out point number two so they can then promote the blog entry they comment in. Yes, plugging other sites helps those sites, but it also increased the number of potential readers of the Street Team comments.
• Get a few t-shirts printed up with the site logo and url on them. Send the shirts to the Street Team as a gift. Walmart sells tee’s fairly cheap from their photo center.
• The Street Team can also help by submitting sites to the various directories out there. Have a member or three keep an eye on Solicitations & Announcements for new free directories or paid directories offering a sale.
• Have them start blogs and post about interesting threads on your forum, and have them add your forum to their blogroll. This is worth doing even if you have to host their blogs yourself, though there are free alternatives out there like wordpress.com or blogger.com.
• Another good idea which can often be more powerful for promotion is to have them set up account on social networking sites like LiveJournal, FaceBook, or Myspace. Many of these sites use NoFollow tags, but it’s not about Google Page rank for this project, it’s about site recognition and gaining members and traffic.
• Other sites offer a link in their profiles. Youtube is one of them and if they are willing to make videos and tag your url onto their work, then so much the better.
• In the forum you make for the team, have them come up with their own ideas to help promote your site

It is important to keep in mind though that when the Street Team is out there on another site, they should keep to the rules of those sites and should keep the community in mind. No one likes a spammer, and very few are willing to follow the link they feel is questionable or spammy. Have them truly interact with such communities and to make friends there. Those friends can in turn convert to potential advertisers as well, as I have followed my friends entries on places like Stumble Upon and have given those pages an additional thumbs up.



I hope you find these techniques useful!
Q

 

Nice tips. Simple but work for some extra traffic

 

Not just extra traffic!

It can lead to more backlinks, higher SERP, product recognition, and more...

 

Surprisingly, there aren't much replies on this thread. I will start to say, your ideas are very good and as a experienced administrator, I am aware of these techniques and I can verify that these actually work and would seriously help your forum from the ground.

Also, I think it is very important to work on the SEO side of the forum, and try to gain as strong SERPs as possible, the better exposure, the better for you and your community, and the more members you'll get. More spammers, too, however do use a strong SPAM filter.

Meti

 

Yes, they should be known I've seen many of the ideas posted here or have written about them myself. Though I do not recall seeing the street team idea around, especially in Forum Management. Maybe this thread would have gotten a better welcome in Marketing?

I encourage my mods and members as well as my street team to all be keyword rich in their posting, and to use proper anchor text for thread titles Though I'd not really place this as a requirement for the street team...

Most other SEO work must be done by yourself as well, so with that I didn't really mention it, though SEO work is still very important to forum growth.
Q

 

but can we find people to join a street team i don't anyone would do it, if any help on this topic would alot maybe i'll try to make a street team

 

Ask your member base, you'd be surprised how many will help if you ask... especially if you are offering a few forum perks.

 

I completly agree, sometimes your users may surprise you. I believe there's lots of users that wish to dedicate their spare time to help communities, and if you are making your point clear I am pretty sure you'll get lots of users on your side.

Meti

 

ok am gonna try it whenmy forum has some more members , if it works i post it here lol

 

Remember to remind your street team to follow the rules and basic netiquette when dealing with other forums or blogs. No one likes a spammer so it's important that they are not just plastering links all over the place. If they care about your community they need to show the same respect to others that they would want on your forum.

 

Very nice opening post, I haven't read all of it but some are pretty interesting.

 

spamming never works if one spmas 1000 forums only 1 or 2 members will signup it just doesn't work streetteam i think should be members on other forums for along time and if they post a link it will helping not spamming.

 

I agree that spamming is certainly NOT the way to go and one should hold their street team to certain standards. Read my link in the OP about forum link building. You'll that it really is not spam if done properly.

 

i dono if it will work on my forum but i'll give it a try.

 

Its been a while... Have you tried it? Hows it working?

 

For me, I have plenty of people from my message board that have already volunteered to help.

However, I have a difficult time allowing just anyone to represent my website in other places. I'm afraid they won't know how to conduct themselves properly.

 

In your forum set up for the team, have a set of rules just for them. Also, be selective on who you allow in. I've had several dozen offers for assistance, and have three members on my team thus far

 

nice topic, definitely helpful for me

 

Thank you for the post above. I will discuss this with the team.

You inquired as to whether we have core members. Yes we have 5 people who are actively promoting the forum.

Another use in another forum pointed out that it will be almost impossible to compete with the large forums without a niche which differentiates from others.

So last night I came up with this idea.

We start a forum called

The GoogleSiteClubs Pet Project

Welcome to GoogleSiteClubs Google project. Here we will develop a Google web site from scratch documenting the entire process start to finish. We will show daily statistics of visitors and a Google revenue report. We will try different colors, and ad positions and document the increases or decreases in revenue.

We will also analyze different marketing approaches that we use in generating revenue.

That is just a rough draft based on my minute of thought.

Will expand in time.

Hope you all follow this marketing experiment.

What do you think?

 

I think that is a great idea and could generate hits all on it's own, as well as potentially create a buzz about it. When you get it going, be sure to start a thread here announcing the project (once it gets into full swing) so that others can watch its progress. (post it up in a google board, as that is where your core watchers will be). I'd also like a PM so I can watch it myself, heh, I don't get up there all that much...

Your street team could certainly use that to get the word out about your site, as there are many blogs and sites out there that would have an interest in such a thing. A few well timed and well written posts could give you the edge you need!