The Beginner’s Guide to Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is one of the free methods that the Internet marketing experts keep on encouraging people to use for promoting online business and generating web traffic. As it is free, many webmasters and e-entrepreneurs like to use it to market their website and business. Those who achieved good result in their forum marketing campaigns not just getting free targeted traffic but also making more money online.

In order to use forums effectively to generate traffic for your money making website, several things are required.

Before joining any forum, you must do some homework and research.

1. The forums that you want to Join and use for generating traffic must be relevant to your website topic or your online business. For example, someone involved with an online game product will want to look for game forums to join and participate in the relevant discussions.

2. Choose large traffic forums. Small and unpopular forums have less active members; they wouldn't help you much in generating traffic. Most forums usually show their statistics where you will able to see how many members have joined and how many are active. Choose those forums that have at least 20,000 members.

3. Always read the forum's rules to make sure it allows you to add your website link in the signature box. The signature plays a major role in generating traffic. Your signature will show at the bottom of each of your message posted on the forum. When people read your message, some of them will click on the link in your signature to visit your site. So, if the forum doesn't allow that feature, you should look for another.

After you have chosen and joined two or more large and popular forums that allow you to market your site and business, what next?

1. Login to each forum and go to 'Control Panel' to add a good text link pointing to your site. Don't make the text link too long; try to make it less than 6 words.

2. Start reading the topics and participating in discussions. Never post ads and sale messages on the discussion sections of the forums because most forums don't allow that and this will hurt your reputation and give people impression that you are lacking of experience.

3. Build your reputation as an expert in the forums. Take the time to browse the topic pages and you may find a lot of members questions that need to be answered. Read those questions and reply to those that you are able give good answer, provide them with solutions and advice. Keep on participating in discussion and helping other members; and other members will start knowing you and seeing you as an expert in the field. Your positive image will attract people to click on your link in the signature in order to find more good content or see what you are offering.

4. Write articles and blog posts that will help the forums members to do something they have wanted to do or provide tips and solutions to a problem they are facing. For instance, in the largest webmaster forum, forums.Digitalpoint.com, there is a section inside the forum for members to post their ads and offers about link selling and some buyers have gone into a bad deal because of lacking of knowledge and experience in buying links. The experienced webmasters saw these situations and wrote some link buying guide in their site and blog; and then post the links to their guide in that section. This will sure attract a lot of link buyers visit the sites or blogs to read the guide.

5. Most forums have a section created for members to post ads and offers. Whenever you are running a promotion campaign, the ads section may help you generate more sales. Forum members often like to look for good deal, so if you want them to do business with you, you will need to give discounts, bonuses and etc.