Saturday, December 02, 2006

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is participating in forums that let you include a link to your website in your signature line. While some niches like internet marketing have forums with a overwhelming number of signature line links in every thread, the forums for many other niches have far less members with their own websites. In these less competitive niches the fact that you have your own website will instantly make you something of an expert; most of the members are normal people who are not trying to sell anything and the free traffic your signature line link gets will be very targeted and high quality.

Obviously the first step is to research the forums for your niche paying attention to which have the highest traffic, the most members, topics, posts, views, etc. You are looking for vibrant, bustling forums with the greatest potential to send some serious traffic your way. Browse some threads to get a feel for the community. Are threads snowballing into page after page or are they petering out after one or two comments? Make sure they allow you to put links in your signature line or you may be wasting your time. Take note of how many other forum members are advertising a website in their signature line: the less competition the better.

Having selected some forums related to your niche you should being posting employing a very white hat sort of methodology. This means making a good faith effort to join and contribute to the community. The last thing you want to look like is a spammer or a shill. You should consider not even adding your link to your signature line until you have reached 50 or 100 posts. Introduce yourself, ask questions, answer what questions you can, congratulate members on their good news and sympathize with their bad news. Don't think too hard about what to say, just get in there and get posting. After you've established yourself you'll want to add your link to your signature line and start more of your own threads. This is the best way to generate traffic to your own site since people read the first post of a thread and then skim through the comments.

Your threads will need to be quality to be successful but since you will be involved in multiple forums you should be able to to borrow a clever thread idea or two from one forum and employ it on another. Once you have enrolled in several busy forums for your niche, spending just 10 or 20 minutes a day participating in the communities can yield very substantial results.

Here's a great database of the biggest online forums - Big Boards. And here's some of the biggest internet marketing forums that all allow signature links.

Warrior Forum
Digital Point Forums
Webmaster Talk
Webmaster Forums
The V7 Network
Geek Village
Name Pros
Conquer Your Niche

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