How to pick the forums for crowd marketing?

Do you want your crowd marketing campaign to be several times more effective, the deletions rate to be close to zero, receive several times more visitors, and significantly increase sales?

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In this article, you will learn how to choose the right crowd marketing platforms for the best results.
We will analyse how to search for forums, which ones are better suited, and which ones can harm your site.
Finally, you’ll find out how not to waste your money, and get the best results from your crowd marketing campaign, so stay tuned!

You can check out our complete crowd marketing guide here

How to find relevant forums, using Google search operators:

 Google search operators can help us tremendously when it comes to web searches. So, how do we use these magic Google cheats to quickly find forums?
It’s actually very simple.

You can check the entire Google search operator list here. For now, we will focus on the most important search patterns.
The most convenient and easy-to-use Google search operator is “inurl” which allows finding the pages with a specific word in the URL.

Procedure

An “inurl” forum search query is always done based on the following pattern:

keyword inurl:forum

=> The system generates all pages and sub-pages that include the search term in the URL.

Another Google search operator you may use is: “intitle:” It allows you to find pages that contain a specific word in the title.

The “intitle” forum search query is always done based on the following pattern:

intitle:keyword

 The last search operator we want to recommend to you is: “intext:” Using it, you can find the pages that contain a specific word in the content.

The “intitle” forum search query is always done based on the following pattern:

intext:keyword

How to choose the forums for your crowd marketing campaign:

Now, as we know how to search for forums, let’s see how to choose the right forums. When choosing a platform for crowd marketing, there are several indicators to consider: We’ve divided these metrics into two categories: marketing metrics and SEO metrics.

Marketing metrics:

We recommend using the digital intelligence tool similarweb.com to determine marketing metrics. It allows you to determine website traffic, engagement rate, traffic evolution, traffic source, traffic by country, etc.

⦁     Regionality
This is one of the most important parameters, especially if you have a limited shipping business. If you don’t take it into account, the feedback will be minimal. But if you choose forums at the regional level, the efficiency will be several times higher.

⦁     Traffic and development dynamics
You have to consider the platform traffic. The higher the traffic, the more popular the site is, and the more users will see your link.
Also, not only site traffic is important, but the dynamics of its development as well.
Ideally, the traffic should look something like this:

interactive graph similar web

⦁ Audience engagement
Besides traffic, audience engagement is also an important factor. Sometimes, the attendance may be good, while the discussions on the branches are weak. Engagement shows how much users are involved in the discussion. For example, there may be openly advertising comments on the forum that do not correspond to the topic of discussion at all. This indicator is worth paying attention to when analysing branches.

⦁ Forum activity
Activity on forums is crucial for crowd marketing. Sometimes, the forum may have good traffic, but there is no activity in the discussions. In such cases, there will be few or no clicks on your link.

SEO metrics

We recommend using Moz.com to determine the SEO metrics. In fact, the tools we want to recommend were developed by Moz, and you can check the domain authority, page authority, and spam rate on their website. It is completely free.

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⦁ Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that shows the quality of a site’s backlink profile.
We have to mention that Google does not use domain authority as a ranking factor. Still, if you want to get powerful backlinks that will beneficially influence your search rankings, you have to get backlinks from high DA resources.
What kind of domain authority is considered normal?
Of course, the higher it is, the better. But when we are talking about forums, an authority above 40 can be considered optimal.

tabel excel

⦁ Spam score:
Spam Score shows the percentage of the potential risk of receiving a penalty from Google.
In our case, the less spam, the more high-quality the donor is considered.

tabel w

Obviously, most forums have a high spam rating. Therefore, we believe that forums with a spam index below twenty percent should be rated as very good resources.

How to check if the forum gives you Dofollow or Nofollow links?

First, we have to mention that there is nothing wrong with no-follow links, as they help diversify your backlink profile.

Maintaining a natural-looking backlink profile is critical in order to prevent penalties. Thus, well-placed contextual no-follow links can drive relevant traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, and minimize the risks of penalties.

Recommended reading: Do you really need no-follow backlinks?

Still, you need do-follow backlinks that will help you gain more “link juice” and domain authority. In the context of crowd marketing, getting about 50 percent of do-follow backlinks can be considered a perfect result.

So, How Do You Check If a Link is No-follow or Do-follow?

There are several ways to do that. We recommend choosing the easiest one, which includes three simple steps.

1. Right-click on your browser and click “Inspect”.
2. Look for the link in the HTML of the page.
3. If you see a rel=”nofollow” attribute, that link is no followed. Otherwise, the link is do follow.

Conclusion: How to get the best results from your crowd marketing campaign.

When hiring a crowd marketing agency, the major requirements for forum selections are high DA and low spam score. But these are not always decisive metrics. The traffic dynamics of the site and the activity of the audience are much more important.

While the DA and spam score can easily be checked using SEO tools, forum activity must be checked manually by analysing individual branches. But the success of a crowd marketing campaign largely depends on it.

On many forums, the spam score may be slightly higher than usual, while user engagement and traffic evolution are good.
Typically, these sites attract far more customers than sites with low spam and low engagement.

Crowd marketing is really difficult and time-consuming, but it has a huge potential. You can do it all single-handedly or you may hire a crowd marketing agency.
At least now, you know what to look for when launching a forum link-building campaign.

CrowdMark provides strategic, creative, and performance services to consumer-oriented businesses. We help companies increase brand awareness, raise sales, create community, drive interaction and improve site rankings through innovative SEO techniques.