How Does Forum Marketing Work and Is It Worth Your Time?

If you’ve been trying to get traffic to your website or blog, you no doubt have heard about forum marketing. This method of traffic generation is free and definitely has it’s benefits, but…

If you don’t know how to go about forum marketing properly you could very easily get yourself banned or flamed so fast that it will make your head spin.

The reason I’m writing this post is because for the longest while I still had no idea how forum marketing worked and the only reason I kept thinking about it was because I kept hearing about how people were building these huge lists by using forum marketing.

So I hope to eliminate that problem for you with this post.

First of all when you enter any forum it’s always important to read the rules of that particular forum. Some forums are stricter than others so it’s good to know what you’re getting yourself into before you end up having a negative encounter.

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with their rules, you’re going to want to make sure that you set up your profile and signature file.

Your profile will generally consist of all your typical personal information and what not, but here’s something to consider. If you are trying to brand yourself it’s a good idea to upload a photo of yourself and use your real name.

The reason for doing this is that every time you post, you will be helping people to familiarize themselves with your face and name and the more you do so, the better it will be for you when you start promoting your website.

Now let’s talk about the signature file or the “sig file”. This will usually contain a brief blurb about your site along with a link for others to click over to your website or blog.

Example: Want Quick Listbuilding Tactics that Produce Real Results Now? Click Here

So now you’ve got your sig file hooked up and you’re ready to go and start making as many posts as you can right ? Not quite.

Here’s what you have to understand in order to gain maximum traction for profitable results, forums are social communities. Yes you can market to them but if you just jump into a forum shouting: BUY MY STUFF!

… you’re better off keeping your day job.

Here’s a better way to break the ice and get into the flow. Make at least 10-15 posts without any signature. This will give others in the community a favorable impression of you and they will see you as someone who is making genuine contributions as opposed to a spammer looking to carry off a few unwitting souls.

When making your posts, the best way to get into the swing of things is to look for threads where people are asking for help concerning a problem they are having.

If you know the answer, don’t just bluntly post it, because people will think that you’re trying to come off as some big shot know it all and that’s not going to help you any.

Offer your response as a suggestion or as someone who had that problem and this is what you tried and it seemed to work, maybe they might want to give it a shot. The old saying goes: ” A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” and with all the fragile egos you’ll find in the forums, this is the best approach from my experience.

If you don’t know the answer to the question or would like to point them to an outside resource, research the question on Google and find the best or closest solution to the problem and then come back to that thread and let them know that you did a little research concerning their question and this is what you came up with.

Then give them the link to the source and end with “hope that helps” or “Cheers”.

Join just one forum in your niche first and work on applying the information I just shared with you and once you’ve gotten the hang of it you can join more forums.

Forum marketing is good for driving traffic to build a list and building readership to your blog because people like free information and in both cases if you provide information they’re looking for they’ll  most likely join your list or buy stuff from the links posted on your blog.

Anyway this post wasn’t supposed to be this long so… hope this helps.

Cheers,

Nando