Forum marketing may sound confusing but, trust me, it is THE place to be if you're marketing online.
While it's easy to set up a profile and put in your picture, actually knowing how to market yourself on a forum takes a little more finesse.
Getting on a forum and then boasting about your website or blog is not the way to go about a successful forum marketing strategy.
Often, marketers will sign up on several forums with the intention of participating in them all and getting traffic from all of them. Then when this doesn't happen, they are disappointed and declared that "forum marketing doesn't work."
Well, going about it that way certainly doesn't work.
So, what's the 1-2-3 guide to forum marketing?
Step 1 - Sign up with a few forums, not more than you know you can handle participating in. When I think of participating, I think of someone who posts comments or threads of value and that can respond fairly quickly to inquiries. If you are on 10 different forums, are you really going to have time to actively participate in them all?
Step 2 - Actively participate with worthwhile information. So many times, people join forums, make 2 posts and are never heard from again. You have to be active on a regular basis to gain the full benefits of forum marketing.
Let's say you are in the golf niche. You register on 10 forums with a golf focus. You start participating on them all. Only your comments are very uninvolved and don't contribute much to the conversation - here's an example "I agree," "Yes, I do the same thing," or asking the question "What's the best traffic source?" But then after all those comments, since you have so many forums you are on, you neglect this forum to go to this other one.
See what I mean?
This brings us to...
Step 3 - Form relationships with participants there. As marketers, we are in a relationship building business. The focus of forums is to bring together a community of people in a niche to discuss that niche - share ideas, bounce traffic ideas around, form partnerships. None of that can happen if forums are not treated as such.
Forum marketing is based around community involvement.
I have browsed around on several forums where there is no activity and the result is spam intrudes. So even if someone wanted to be active, spam would overcome all the responses.
Finding an active forum is simple - just look at the dates of the comments and responses. Active ones will be active every day, with lots of people participating.
So give forum marketing a try and share your ideas with a targeted community.
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