Forum Marketing
Forum marketing involves posting advertising your website in forums. Forum marketing works best if you’re involved in a niche for the long haul (e.g. I’m into Internet Marketing, and as such it makes sense for me to be involved in all the top webmaster forums).
If you’re just creating a website for a niche but do not choose to delve into it for the long haul, this isn’t for you - you may want to look at other marketing strategies first.
Forum marketing takes a long time to be successful (although it pays off spectacularly once you build your reputation). Like several other traffic building strategies, forum marketing has been around for quite a while and as a result it has been misused and abused beyond recognition and inflict pain on forum owners. However, like all good things, you can still pull this off quite successfully if you are
It’s also a great way to find out information on a niche that you can put together into an eBook or some other kind of info product. The key to marketing your product in forums is to realize that a forum is a place for discussion, not selling. As such, you cannot go in and blatantly start asking people to visit your website (try it – you’ll be banned within days). Direct salesmanship – the kind that works on a sales letter – does not work in forums.
To tap into the power of forum marketing without pissing people off, you need to give first. It is ultimately more blessed to give than to receive. You can never go wrong if you give first. You need to me a valuable member of the forum and earn the trust and respect of other members first. You have to build your
reputation and credibility as an expert on your topic and gain the respect and trust of the people who are, in some ways, your target market/affiliates. To achieve this seemingly impossible task, you have to give first. Give in terms of your knowledge and skills – teach the newbies in the forums what you know, and help out other forum members with answers and suggestions to their problems.
In addition, you have to build relationships with the top forum people – the moderators and the respected members who will eventually be the key to your success. Building your forum reputation takes a lot of time, and it’s easy to destroy it with a couple of mistakes. You can promote your website without seeming to do so. Simply add your website and a one liner in our signature file. That way, you are not offensive. People will start clicking on your link when the see the quality of your posts.
What’s your website about? Which niche are you trying to conquer? Find out the most popular forums for your niche, join them, and spend some time each day participating in the conversations and discussions going on there. It pays off once you’re well known in your niche. Plus, you can also refer people time to time to articles on your website when they’re relevant to the discussion. Ideally you’d want to start participating in forums some time before you decide to create a book or some other kind of info product, in order to help you build a profile.
Forum marketing is most useful if you plan to be involved in that niche full-time. If you’re just creating an info-product in a niche as a side-business and not as a long-term investment, then forum marketing may be too ‘timeintensive’ for you.
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