Forum marketing is a great strategy to get targeted traffic to your site. Forum is a site where online discussion takes place between guests and members of the forum.
It is a great site to target as every forum is specific to its niche and people taking part in that forum obviously are the people who are interested in that niche.
So driving traffic from such targeted site likes forums will attract real targeted audience who are highly likely to convert, once offered solution to their problems.
So how are we going to do forum marketing?
The first thing you need to do is find forums in your own niche. Look for busy forums with large number of participants.
Then key is to start participating in forum with useful contents. You may start by asking a question or by answering any question in that forum.
You can even comment on other participant’s comments and introduce yourself with good name.
So what is the purpose of this exercise?
The amazing thing you do with forum is that whenever you post any comment you also link back to your own site below that comment.
That link below the comment is called signature. And for every one comment you make you create one link below that comment as your signature.
Your actual aim is to persuade people to click that link so that they can be directed to your site.
So for this reason, you must try to make your signature interesting, and it must create curiosity to people to dig further behind your signature.
A good technique is to setup your signature with the same words you actually promoting in actual.
For example if your aim is to drive traffic to your site where you are offering a giveaway, then your signature may contain words describing that giveaway.
Now you know what forum marketing is. If you haven’t done forum marketing before, then I would suggest you to try today, it’s very interesting and enjoyable for most of the marketers.
Before you select one forum for your further activity, one piece of advice is worth to mention. Always remain positive during discussion.
There may be instances when you would not agree with others. But never leave any negative or hostile comments even you don’t agree what other is saying.
Always keep in mind you are marketer so there is no point to be personal if it is hard person to reply.
Another thing to remember is that you must be a problem solver in your niche and being positive and helpful make you attractive in others eyes.
A very important tip to use in forum marketing is the use of PM effectively. What does PM stands for? PM means private messaging.
So if you use PM actively with forum participants you will get a very positive response for your desired action from that participant.
Many a times you develop your relationship in a manner that it goes to next level to explore new avenues like JV , or auto responder swaps or any mutual project.
So forum marketing not only gives you targeted traffic, backlinks for SEO, but many times it can also give you really good friends in your niche to work with in future projects.
It is easy to find a forum in any niche. Go into Google search and type; your niche + forum.
You will get lots of forums in SERP’s. Before, you select one forum to participate there are two terms I need to speak about. They are threads and posts. Both terms are frequently used inside forums.
So what is thread? It is simply the topic initiated by someone. Now all the replies on this topic will be called posts.
When you create any thread or even reply by post you create link below your comment and that signature or link will be visible for every participant of the forum.
Now to start in a forum you need to sign up and first locate your control panel where you will fill up your profile, even upload your own photo and create your clickable signature.
I would suggest you to say hello in a section where new participant generally introduce to rest of the people.
Then look for a new post or a new thread option whatever you may chose and write your comments to get involved with rest of the community.
Sometimes to make your comments nice and friendly you may use smiley face, or change the font colours or make few texts italics or bold to appear more nicely.
Remember again, the purpose of entire exercise is to get the people click on your signatures. That’s the way you drive traffic to your site.
And for the people to do this make sure your signature is stand out and must speak of your giveaway or site right in the forum. Something interesting giving people a reason to click to.