What is forum marketing?
A forum is an online community where visitors may read and post topics of common interest. So the answer to What is Forum Marketing would actually be using a forum to do marketing in. This is a “not so new” method of getting free traffic that I am sure a lot of you have heard about before, but very few people actually do it. I really have no idea why people don’t do this because it’s such an easy way to drive the best traffic to your website for free.
A good place to start!
Forums can be a useful tool for anyone doing business online, both in terms of reading the content and actively participating in the discussions. Forum marketing presents a great opportunity for everyone to make money online and it is definitely a good way to earn some money when starting out. Forum marketing is very commonplace, and there are many Internet marketers leveraging the potential of forums to earn $1000s online.
Participate
Participation, whether as a member, moderator, or owner, can help one achieve recognition within a business community, and may even generate highly-qualified business leads. Forums differ, however, in their treatment of self-promotion; some disallow any trace of self-promoting. A few forums are geared specifically towards self-advertising. Many forums fall somewhere in between. This limits URL’s to an off-the-page member profile.
Reading a forum’s archives can be a good way to obtain a basic knowledge about a topic, and it also provides a historical perspective on trends and opinions.
It is very important to read the terms and conditions of each particular forum for a basic guideline as to what is acceptable. Additionally, it is a good idea to read archived posts in order to see the guidelines in action. Failure to do so can have negative consequences, including tarnishing your site’s reputation and getting permanently banned from the community.
A huge targeted audience.
There are 1000s of forums out there ranging from topics such as dieting to electronics to model airplanes and making money. There is a forum for just about anything you can imagine, and this presents a fantastic opportunity for marketers.
The great thing about forums is that people are looking for answers to questions or solutions to their problems. You can take advantage of this by offering something that will help people solve these problems. All you need to do is promote relevant products through your signature in forums. To give yourself credibility you should be a regular contributor to the forums and provide valuable content.
You want to make sure that when you promote in a forum that it is not obvious or it will be deemed to be spam. Again, you should make sure that you offer value with high quality posts that are relevant to the discussion. As with any other marketing attempt, relevancy is your key. You would have a very difficult time trying to promote something like a dieting product in an Internet marketing forum, so keep your content and your product offerings highly relevant to the forum.
Remember, you can promote any product within a forum if it is relevant to the topics being discussed.
Forums will provide you with:
- A large targeted audience
- Information about what your audience needs or wants
- Backlinks to your website through your SIG file, which search engines love
- An opportunity to interact with potential buyers, subscribers and JV partners
Forum marketing is a great way to build up some cash without the expenditure of your own money. You can easily make a full time income by forum marketing if you have knowledge within a specific area or are willing to research an industry!
Finding Forums
You can easily find an abundance of forums within almost any industry by performing a quick search in Google. For example, if you were looking to find a forum on “weddings”, you could type the following into Google: Wedding forum.
Look for forums that are relevant to your niche, website and product. A large member base will provide you with a very targeted audience. Every marketer dreams about that. Choose some of the older forums that will have a good mix of new members and older members. You can leverage the wisdom of some good stable marketers and offer good information to the newer members based on their expressed needs.
Here is a short list of forums that you can start with.
This forum has been in operation for about 13-14 years . It’s topics deal with SEO, Google Adsense and Analytics. The
website offers a free and a subscription based membership. There is a lot of activity in the forum. The responses that I read were well written.
Two Clickbank Guru’s established this forum. They have a very responsive membership with a total of 631 members. Advertising with a SIG file is allowed. These contributors have some serious knowledge and information to share. This looks like a good place to check out.
By and away the Warrior Forum is probably the largest marketing forum online. Questions are answered quickly. Make sure you read the rules and abide by them. It is a great source for marketing and getting subscribers. Interactions are amazing and responses to questions were very good. You will need to do some research when you start posting answers in this forum.
Darren Olander created this forum. He works a lot with traffic exchanges and Viral Mailers. It has a unique twist since it uses credits as a exchange basis for free advertising.
This is the big boy in town. Some of the bigger networks such as Yahoo are adding “question and answer” components to their networks. These sites provide a great opportunity for us as Internet marketers. We can not only help people out with their questions, we can also monetize (make money from) our participation by recommending a product in our response.
Here is an example of how it works:
- Someone creates a profile at Yahoo Answers and posts a question. This question could range from earning extra money, to the best way to lose weight before going on vacation.
- It is time for you to go to work now, but first you must have a profile in order to do this.
- Researching the topics will help you offer a quality response. If someone is looking to earn extra money online, you could recommend them to a program and give them the reasons why it will help. Offer to help them in the program by giving them your forum or affiliate name. You can do the same with someone looking to lose weight by sending them to a site like ediets.com (through your affiliate link) and give the reason why.
Make sure that you offer value within your “answer”. Do not just spam and try to make money by doing it, that will get you booted off these networks very quickly. Redirecting your affiliate link may be required in some cases.
Forum Marketing Tips
- Determine if advertising or SIG files are allowed. Your ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website. You will not reach your goal if no advertising or SIG files are allowed.
- Join relevant forums. They need to be relevant to your website, niche or product that you are marketing.
- Make sure you read the terms and conditions
- Make yourself familiar about the rules for advertising and what would be considered spam.
- Be consistent in your reading and research. Answer questions and create posts daily, not once a week or once a month. You probably spend hours on Facebook every day. Does Facebook drive traffic to your website. It actually can if you use if properly.
- Always provide good and relevant content. Offer value inside your answer.
Here’s to your success in 2018.
Donnie Ellis
PS Please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question.