As I was posting in various forums in an effort to promote my reciprocal blog review for increased readership, I realized that I was doing something that others were not. I created a new topic on Bloggst as I would normally do in a forum, but I immediately recognized that my post stood out from the existing topics. Why is that? Well, I simply made use of one of the post icons, a feature common to almost any forum on the Web today.

By default, many forums are set up such that no icon is selected by default for a new topic, as per the screenshot below. Furthermore, many posters to a forum will simply write their message and search for the “submit” button.

When I made my post on Bloggst, I selected the “lightbulb” icon that you see above to indicate that it’s an idea I had. After I submitted my post, it jumped out of the page compared to all the other topics that lacked a post icon and simply fell in line.

Whether I will definitely have more readers in my post compared to other posts is still to be seen. However, I have a feeling that it will assist in boosting the readership compared to other topics in the same forum.