Forum promotion: Casting a wide net is not as effective as steady, continuous effort.
The topic of forum promotion, which seems to have been discussed to death, remains a territory that many grassroots webmasters and marketers are unwilling to abandon. After all, online forums gather the vast majority of people. So as long as the forums exist, advertisements will too.
Regarding how to do forum promotion well, there is no shortage of experience sharing on this topic. A basic understanding is to write some articles, include links, and then post them everywhere, much like the small ads you see on the streets. Street ads get cleaned up by sanitation workers, and forum ads get deleted by moderators. A more effective method is to not include links but instead incorporate keywords, put in more effort to write a few good soft articles, thus reducing the chances of being deleted. This method seems to work pretty well. Of course, some people point out that forum promotion isn't just about posting and bumping threads; it also requires time to mature. Accumulate popularity and credibility by frequently posting and replying on the forum, focus on word-of-mouth marketing, and advertising afterward becomes easier. This is somewhat similar to QQ group promotion methods. For these promotional methods, as long as there's enough execution, results will definitely follow. However, after each article is posted, they operate independently without any connection to one another, so the potential promotional effect of each soft article won't last very long. Therefore, if soft articles are published in a serialized form, the effects will gradually accumulate and amplify.
Previously, Fantasi saw a serialized post on Tianya Forum. The author was selling hand-painted shoes and started a thread in one section of Tianya, updating daily with stories about their journey from zero to successfully mastering marketing strategies. These stories were all personally experienced by the author and were definitely coherent, resulting in high traffic. In the posts, the author also explained some marketing cases, subtly promoting themselves, and the effect was quite good, with text and images combined. Compared to the aforementioned forum promotion methods, this approach only involved one post, yet its effectiveness far surpassed the scattergun approach.
In fact, many forums have serialized posts, and these posts often have high popularity. Most of these posts are story-based, as netizens generally browse forums for entertainment, much like watching TV dramas. Good content captures readers' attention, and incorporating advertisements at appropriate times makes them more acceptable than pure ad bombardment. For example, the popular "Jia Junpeng Biography" on Mop.com was also a serialized post.
As for how to create serialized posts, there are many ways. Take a look at what themes the serialized posts on forums cover, extract the essence, and create based on your own situation. Characters can be fictional or real. The post mentioned earlier on Tianya Forum was completely true, but Fantasi has also seen some serialized posts where the authors were fictional, which might not be obvious to those not involved in online promotion. Through a fictional character, the author narrates their entrepreneurial history, and naturally promotes their benefactors and website/forum in the process. Later, I searched for the title of the post and found that it had been widely distributed across many forums with impressive traffic.
The growth of every grassroots webmaster is not easy. Writing about one's own story is easy to touch people. Creating a fictional character, as long as the theme is bright enough and the language organization is good enough, can also yield good promotional results. There may be too many theoretical things, but execution always lags behind theory, so the results still require more practice.
