I’m sure by now that you’ve been introduced to the idea of using forums to generate traffic to your website. This can be a very useful way of generating target traffic for no cost and while having fun at the same time. I’m also sure that by now you’ve heard of long tail article writing to generate traffic to your site. This is another effective method of traffic generation since it capitalizes on search terms with low competition. However, great result can be obtained by combining these two methods into one.

In order to understand exactly how this works it is important to understand why long tail article writing works. Certainly the point is to target keyword phrases with little competition but why do these keyword phrases exists? The answer lies in the fact that people, when they are searching for information, are interested in some particular piece of information, not general facts.

The problem arises that one can only determine long tailed keyword phrases by using keyword tools such as overture to determine the search volume of some particular phrase. This, however, doesn’t tell the whole story as there are many other questions that are being asked by people in your niche everyday that don’t appear with great enough frequency in the keyword databases.

There are two main reasons that this happens, the first is that when someone goes online looking for information on some particular subject it isn’t always entirely clear what to search for. It isn’t as if you can just type in the question that you have and the search engines can figure out what it is that you are asking and then find information for you. If search engines were this good then ebooks and the like wouldn’t have any more use.

The second reason is that often the technologies and concepts that are in vogue in any particular niche are often changing and evolving and so the keyword databases can’t keep up with the current state of a niche. This occurs a lot more often then you’d think since keyword databases require months of search data before any noticeable patterns emerge.

But never fear, you can overcome these problems and deliver quality information to your niche with little effort needed to determine what the hot questions are in your niche. The answer is to browse the popular forums in your particular niche and try and figure out what the common questions are that are being asked.

Once you know what sort of information people are looking for, you can then do the research yourself and do a nice, long, informative write up on the subject and add it to your website. Then, continue to browse all of the forums in your niche and whenever anyone asks a question related to the new content on your site, make a brief answer (try to at least partially answer the original poster’s question) and then provide a link to your site promising more information on the subject.

Lastly, make sure to bookmark this new content on various social bookmarking sites as if a few people in your niche are interested in a question, it is likely that many more are as well. If you continue to do this you will not only build a steady stream of traffic to your site but you’ll also become known as an authority in your niche, something every webmaster strives for.