There are thousands of forums on the internet. Some of these are general in nature whereas some are niche specific. These forums can be a great way to establish your reputation and to drive targeted traffic to your website. Forums can be very effectively used to market your products and services. Forums are also a great place to learn from others and to know how to solve your problems.
The first step in forum marketing is to look for relevant forums in your niche. The topic of the forum must be relevant to your product. For example, if you are in the healthcare niche, it will be of no use posting in a dog forum or a car forum, as you won’t find any prospective customers there. You can do a ‘Google’ search to find the relevant forums and register with them. The next step is to go to the profile page and add a few lines about yourself, along with your website/blog address. Go through the rules and guidelines of the respective forums to see whether they allow the use of signature links. The signature link is the most important thing in forum marketing. It contains a link to your website or blog or keywords to advertise your internet business. This signature link is placed at the end of each post. Forum members and other visitors may visit your site/blog through this link. Different forums may have different rules regarding signature lines. Some may allow the use of affiliate links in the signature line whereas some forums may only allow a link to your blog or website. Make sure that the rules are not violated or you may be banned from the forum. Posting your signature link in popular forums has another advantage. These forums are often crawled by different search engines and the posts may be indexed there. This will help you to get targeted search engine traffic to your site or blog.
After you join a forum, go through the posts to get a feel. Participate actively in the forum by making useful posts. Try to answer questions that help to solve other people’s problems. If you contribute to the forum as an active member, a lot of members would visit your site through the signature link. But do not make the mistake of posting in the forum for a few days and then disappear. Make regular posts so that you become a trusted member of the community, which will help to drive traffic to your website or blog.
4 Comments
Davor Gasparevic
December 21, 2009 at 15:33Yes, I am a member of only 1 forum partly relevant to my blog, and so far it is my second source of all visitors I’ve received this month, more than 50 visits, and the forum has only around 1650 members.
I didn’t go with that attention at all, but still I get traffic.
In my future affiliate adventures I will participate in niche forums and try to grow my lists…
Andre Clippard
December 24, 2009 at 01:37Thanks for writing about a very relevant topic. Most tenderfoot entrepreneurs nowadays promote and offer and sell whatever they can without even having a concrete idea of what things to prioritize. Keep them coming!
Gregory Despain
January 12, 2010 at 12:52This is a very good post. Occassionally, I will do a search on Google for a good blog to read. I think I encountered one here.