Forum promotion is essentially about registering an account, posting threads, and doing these kinds of tasks. However, it's not easy to do it well and truly increase user engagement. For e-commerce, improving conversion rates is even more challenging. Here, I will use e-commerce forum promotion as an example to discuss the key points that need attention.
1. Choose a good promotional point.
Many e-commerce businesses don't know where to start with forum promotion, thinking that hiring someone to write a few articles, adding links, and randomly posting them will suffice. This is actually wrong. Not only will this approach fail to achieve the desired effect, but in some cases, it may also cause users to feel annoyed. The real outcome might just be an additional external link that doesn't last long. So, how should it be done? Let's analyze the user base. Two important applications of e-commerce are online shopping and brand promotion. The ultimate goal of both is the same: readers of soft articles will improve their understanding of the brand and products after reading, leading to purchases at online or physical stores. Alright, we can confirm that the purpose of soft articles is for promotion and increasing conversion rates. As consumers, how do you trust a brand, become interested in the product, and make a purchase? Convenience, professionalism, safety, affordability, reliable after-sales service, others have bought from there, and they felt it was pretty good. If you write according to these requirements, the result would be consumer experience soft articles. In my soft article promotion plan, soft articles are divided into eight major categories and 32 subcategories, with consumer experience soft articles being the most important one. What are consumer experience soft articles? They are articles written by consumers (netizens) who see the brand's promotional advertisement, make a purchase, and then express their feelings and perceptions during the purchasing process in words. These articles can include images and text, using colloquial language and intimate tones between friends, similar to two old friends chatting casually in a bar or two close friends whispering privately. Here are a few examples:
http://www.rwzb.com/kehuanli/
http://www.rwzb.com/ruanwentuiguang/
http://www.rwzb.com/weijigongguan/
2. Select the right promotional platform.
Once the article is ready, the first release site must have a certain level of recognition among the target audience. Additionally, place some advertisements on the first release site, making your consumer experience appear genuine and credible. If your selected sites and articles are excellent, they could be recommended to the homepage, resulting in significant clicks, replies, and related inquiries. Some smaller sites might even actively re-post your article. At this point, you can manually re-post the article to professional forums with some traffic, such as shopping or industry-related forums. This can involve multiple aspects of investigation, like asking friends, discussing with professional users, or even hiring a consulting company to conduct a survey. You can use keywords to search for forums on Baidu, tallying up the top 100 forums and publishing sequentially. Specific operational methods are as follows:
1. Personnel and time arrangement: one promotion staff member, working hours 09:00-18:00 (with a 60-minute break), promotion duration 30 days
2. Promotion targets:
3. Promotion venues and strategies: external forums, conquered through various soft articles
4. Initial environment: currently no traces of any external forum promotion, very few external links, and extremely low external forum source IPs
5. Ideal goal: 1000 IPs/day
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Practical process:
1. Familiarize yourself with the product and conduct potential customer analysis.
2. Use Baidu/Google to search for relevant keywords and collect a list of forum addresses. Further collect information through existing forum websites' friend links.
Forum requirements: PR3 or above, Alexa rank within 1 million.
Through screening: 108 forums meet the conditions, among which the top 3 (priority) are sorted out and categorized.
This forum database needs to be expanded and maintained over time.
3. Register for the above 108 forums and keep detailed records (details should also be considered during registration, such as personal signatures).
The above three steps are not included in the practical time arrangement and need to be prepared beforehand. Below is the beginning of the practical phase.
4. Daily actions: Spend one hour in the morning skillfully embedding links in pre-prepared original or pseudo-original soft articles.
The general content of the soft article should be clarified in the promotional points.
The next step is to post these soft articles. Log in and post in the corresponding sections.
Keep detailed records (which forums cannot carry links or have links filtered out).
Based on the relevance of the forum section, the title needs to be appropriately modified.
Depending on the nature and content of the soft article, not all 108 forums may be useful.
5. Next-day actions: Check the effectiveness of the links posted yesterday. If deleted, promptly add the forum address to the blacklist and temporarily cease similar soft article promotion. After the second day's inspection: 7 forums deleted posts, 10 forums had no links.
Re-statistics data sources, find the top 10 again.
For the top 10 forums, handle multi-ID bumping (when not on the first page). Repeat the above process.
6. After 30 days of hard work, it's finally over.
Although soft articles were posted on nearly 108 forums, only the top 30 forums actually brought traffic.
Practical data: 512 IPs/day, thread survival rate 87% (18% of posts without direct links), total thread clicks 220,000, replies 1,300, internal messages 203, inquiry count: 6.7/day, order count unpublished. (The above data is statistically accurate, with some parts uncountable.)
Summary: Some large and highly relevant forums control posts too strictly, prohibiting all external links. Like the top source, posts are strictly controlled, especially soft articles with external links, which are basically removed by moderators (though we can re-edit them with a certain probability of deletion), relatively consuming time and energy! Small forums review posts less strictly, but without traffic import, it's useless. The expected goal was not achieved (1000 IPs/day, actual result was 512 IPs/day). The reasons are roughly as follows:
1. Mainstream forums strictly control external links, often deleting posts (deleting posts with external links regardless of content)
2. Few effective forums, need further expansion
3. Post quality needs improvement, identity types need variation, finding more entry points
4. Except for the first release site and the top 2 sites, other forums lack advertising support, resulting in insufficient awareness.
After reading this, you should have a clear understanding of the entire external forum promotion process. By presenting this case, I aim to exchange ideas with everyone, seeking new methods and thoughts for forum promotion.
3. Customized plans and execution are most important.
After completing the above process, you will find that each day brings some inquiries and orders. Now, it's time to customize a plan, standardizing and proceduralizing this promotion method. Assign a dedicated person to write articles, study the rules of major forums, publish and bump posts regularly and quantitatively, re-post, discover more excellent first-release sites, and your orders will come in continuously. If it's a company not specializing in e-commerce, you can outsource this process or entrust a team or company to handle it, without much cost. The most important thing is to maintain communication with the team, ensuring responsibility and quantification, and ideally having them report to the company regularly. Many companies I've dealt with have great ideas but fall short in execution, or spend money ineffectively, so the results aren't obvious. On the other hand, companies that outsource forum promotion to us consistently show rising sales performance. Trust enables such cooperation to be long-term, benefiting both parties, evolving into overall solution services.