Forum Marketing has been touted as the next big thing in website promotion. It can indeed bring you traffic but you must be very careful with what forum you select. The following five steps will help insure that your time is not wasted. And you must be willing to invest time if you want forum marketing to work.

Choose A Forum Which Matches Your Niche

It seems almost every niche and sub-niche has a ton of forums. Therefore there is no need for you to join a forum that has nothing to do with your product. If your niche is Pet Grooming then there would be no advantage to joining a forum on Gardening. Unless your posts are on gardening, which will not help draw traffic to your site, your posts will most likely be viewed as spam. (more…)

Do you want to know the secret weapon that most gurus have in their traffic building toolbox? Discussion forums. What better place to meet potential customers and find out all of their problems than in a forum, where they will quite happily tell you everything you need to know about their issues and more? Here are just five ways your business can benefit from a forum.

1. Build your credibility

If you take the time to write well-thought out answers to people’s questions then you are demonstrating a real understanding of the issues that people face. You are also demonstrating that you have the answers they need to solve their problems. Of course by contrast if you post for the sake of it you will lose any good reputation you have very quickly. Add value to the forums, don’t spam them. (more…)

Article Marketing

Information is in high demand, in fact, it’s the fuel that drives the internet. Web designers are constantly looking for fresh content to fill their sites and those surfing the web are there for the same thing, info. If you have information that will be helpful to others in your niche you can easily become a reputable source for information and therefore people in your niche will look to you for answers to their questions. Article marketing involves creating short focused articles related to your niche that can be distributed through article databases and posted as content on other sites. In your articles there will be a “bio box” with information about the author and a link to your site. Imagine the power of those inbound links and the resulting business.

Opt-In Marketing

When you offer information to your readers you have the chance to provide them with more information, but don’t pass up such a wonderful opportunity to get to know your readers. You can legally gather contact information from your “readers” by making them “subscribers”. On your sales page you can offer free information in exchange for your readers opting in to your mailing list. This will benefit you both in that you will be able to contact them directly when you have new product to offer and they will not have to keep returning to find out when you release new products. In order to keep your list legal and ethical you will want to use a reputable list management company.

Forum Marketing

If you find an active forum that has been built around your niche you should become an active participant in that forum. Don’t just bust through the gates with your sales pitch in hand, really become an authoritative source for help in the forum and you will earn the trust and respect of the community you are trying to market to. Conduct yourself professionally by replying in a reasonable amount of time and respecting the input of others. The sales pitch comes in your signature line. Most forums will not tolerate using their forum as a platform just to advertise your product, but since most people in forums begin as perfect strangers, the other members will want to know who you are and how you know what you know so they will look at your signature. If you are allowed, include a link to your website and maybe a short & soft sales tag. If you treat the community right, they will know where to look when they need your product.