1) Find The Right Forums
Find forums with a similar niche. Every time you post or create new threads you will expose your backlinks to people of the same interest. Not only is this good to directly promote your product or service, you will gain relevant backlinks. Relevant backlinks are important for SEO! Besides SEO, driving traffic from relevant niche forums means highly targeted traffic.
2) Think “Long Term”
Creating an effective forum presence takes time. Although you may have the ability to gain tons and tons of high quality traffic, it may take some time. Join conversations and help others to create a valid contribution! The more value you put into each and every post, the more you will build authority and trust. When first starting out forum marketing, make sure you build credibility for yourself, for others, and forum administrators. The last thing you want to do is get banned.
3) Forum Rules And Guidelines
It is important to be familiar with forum rules and guidelines. Each forum is different and may have different policies when it comes to forum marketing. Take the following for example:
a) are affiliate products allowed in signature links?
b) can I have a signature link to another forum?
c) can I promote my own business in my signature links?
d) are new users restricted from certain capabilities; signatures, profile pics, etc.
4) Username And Avatar
Choose a professional username. This will tell people that how serious you are about your business. Make sure you upload an avatar so you can start to build credibility and authority over others. These two aspects of forum marketing is essential to create a successful presence.
5) Introduce Yourself
It is best to introduce yourself at a new forum. In my experience, many regular users or administrators strongly urge this act.
6) Don’t Be Hasty
Make sure you create a good first impression at all costs. Newbie forum members can be easily resented by other “older” members if disobeying rules.
7) Valuable Contribution
Think of every post you make on a forum, whether a comment or thread, a way of building your authority, recognition, and expertise. This one aspect of forum marketing is very important and will determine your success in the long run!
Market Your Website
Add your website in your signature link. I recommend you create a narrow niche website for many reasons. It is very easy to build authority when you have a whole website dedicated to one narrow niche. Your signature link will appear with each forum post you make, which is great for not only direct traffic but SEO.
9) Avoid Negativity
Do not run into any negative arguments or thoughts. If you want to run a professional forum marketing business you have to be profressional yourself. Create a positive atmosphere at all times and you will quickly gain credibility and respect.
10) Track Marketing Efforts
Create a progress chart/traffic chart for how many visitors are gained from each forum. This will give an estimate of progress and the potential high quality traffic that forum can bring each month to your website! Some form of progress will provide information on whether a successful forum marketing campaign is being build or not.
