Marketing in discussion forums can be an excellent source of targeted traffic if you do it right. Many people understand that they should be doing forum marketing, but are unclear on how to go about it. Here are four ways you can do for marketing better than you may currently be doing it.
1. Find a handful of forums to join in and become active in them. You want to hang out where people have common interests that relate to the theme of your business.
It may take a little while for you to become comfortable with a small list of forums, but eventually you will settle in on ones that work best for you. This is a much better approach than trying to join a high number of discussion forums and not participating on a regular basis in any of them.
2. Create a signature file that contains products not everybody else is selling. Also don’t include products in your signature file for a product that everyone else already has.
For example if you are in a membership site, there is no sense putting a link to that membership site in your sig file. It is amazing how many people do that.
One other thing is do not overcrowd your signature file. You will get better results if you target a couple of your favorite websites or products and refer people to those.
3. Work at creating credibility within the forum. You do this by being helpful and providing quality information.
Many people think that the number of posts they make is more important than the quality of them. You will find that people respect you, and will go to your signature file more often, if you are providing quality responses to the questions they have.
This is known as adding value to the discussion and is extremely important if you want to do forum better.
4. Do not spam in any forum post. This is the quickest way to lose your credibility and to get banned by the forum itself. Spamming a forum post is where your answer is written in the form of a sales pitch as opposed to being a helpful answer.
In summary this is four ways to do forum marketing better. Many people make a full time living on the Internet today doing nothing more than marketing their business in forums. They get more quality traffic, sell more products, and make more friends for future business, just through this excellent form of Internet marketing.