Forum Marketing and How it Works

Are you looking for a targeted group of people to click on your links and go to your website? Are you looking for people who are already interested in your product or service? Are you tired of untargeted traffic and want to spend time and money on traffic that actually has a higher chance of producing sales or leads? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then forum marketing might be for you. There are many myths about forum marketing. First of all, a simple definition of forum marketing is that you find forums that your particular content or landing page caters to and get your link in front of their eyeballs. It is as simple as that. However, to properly execute the strategy it takes a lot of creativity. It is not forum spamming. You can’t just go to a specific targeted forum, drop a link and expect your posts to stay and expect not to get banned. That will not happen. Forum moderators are very protective about their forums. They want their forums to provide high-quality content to the people who visit their forums. In other words, they are worried about their credibility. So if you want to do well in forum marketing, you have to adapt the mindset of the people who moderate forums. In other words, you have to think like a moderator. What kind of content would you like to see on a forum? What kind of messages would add value to the people who go to those forums? In other words, by championing the needs of the moderators and the visitors of these forums, you become a co-content creator instead of a spammer. Sadly, many of the forum marketers disregard this and they do several things that degrade the value of forum traffic. If you want to succeed in forum marketing, follow these three tips.

 Forum Marketing Tips

1. Don’t just settle for signature marketing. The most common way to do forum marketing is to post a lot and get eyeballs to your signature. This leads to the temptation of posting garbage or replying with one line post hoping that people will look at your signature and click. This just doesn’t cut it. Many moderators are on to this trick and will ban you. So to get away from this, you have to post real responses. This means that you have to answer the real question that is posed in the discussion. You have to contribute real content.

2. Contribute real content. How do you define “real content”? Real content addresses needs, questions, or fulfills a need. That is the real definition of real content. Most forum posts have a question embedded in it. Take the time to read through. Analyze the needs that are embedded in the question. Look at the different questions that are raised by the discussion. If anything, use the basic journalistic “Who, what, where, when, why and how” to come up with a different angle with which you can use to make a post.

3. Your post must not be promotional in nature. Your post must always be responsive, which means you have to take to heart the actual question of the thread. You shouldn’t approach posting with promotion in mind. If you do this and you do this in a clumsy way, you will get banned or your post will be deleted. Either way it’s bad news for you. It’s really important to answer the question in such a way that you promote yourself but not in a blatant manner. This takes time to perfect. That’s why it’s very important to look at other posters who have signature lines and promote products and see how they do it. There is certain finesse to it. It takes time, patience and open mind. Do that to be an excellent forum marketer.

Filed in: Blog • Traffic Generation
Tagged with: forum marketing • social marketing • social media marketing