Monday, September 14, 2009

Marketing on Internet Forums

The title is a bit misleading, but if you understand the proper etiquette of forums they can lead to thousands of targeted visitors, leads, and sales. One of the most important thing about marketing with a forum whether in your niche or not is to make sure that you do not spam. If you sign up to a forum and the first post you make is a huge copy and pasted ad then 9 times out of 10 you will be thrown out of the forum banned and pretty much forgotten about. Now if you enter the forum with your first month or so attempting to make friends and learn/teach about the subject of the forum then you should do alright. When on the forum the number one rule is to be friendly, courteous, and helpful.

Now your first month on the forum should be kind of like the first month in a new school. Take your time finding all the clicks and doing your best to not screw up. In this school the preppy good kids who make friends with the teachers (forum admin) will be the ones who will have the most leeway when advertising. If a moderator or well respected member of the community leaves a link to their site usually the forum admin will let it slide as long as the link pertains to the subject material. This is key to getting direct traffic from a forum and is a very good reason to be in forums that have pertain to your web presence. Personally I own a website marketing blog and because of this I spend countless hours within v7n and DP looking through all the new posts answering and asking questions and trying my best to give the best content possible.

Now this will help get visitors, but it is not the only way. Most forums allow you to add a signature where you will be allowed to leave links to your web presences and this can help both get visitors through clicks as well as help your placement in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs. Links are definitely the only factor to consider when trying to rank well in Google or others, but should be taken into considerations since they are the deciding placing factor of websites that represent the same content. Now you need to learn BB code and to do this all you need to type into Google is either learn BB code or BB code tag list both of these will bring up websites very useful in giving you the tools necessary to learn how to take full advantage of your forum usage.

One thing I want to make clear is never use a forum to spam this is all too common and the reason there are so many moderators on forums is to ban people who spam. Keep the conversation active on the same topic and try to spend time each and every day in your niches forum learning about all the new things happening. Anyway I hope you found this article active.

1 comment:

  1. Online forums are nice place for promoting your site...however, you have to keep in mind to do it moderately to avoid getting suspended or worst banned from the forums..also avoid posting off topic replies to avoid getting flamed at by fellow forumers.

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