Today, I want to address a question that I’ve been seeing pop up in internet marketing forums and my experiences with it as of late.  The question is something along the line of “Is forum marketing really worth it?”  When you’re starting out online, people will often tell you that forum marketing is a good way to get traffic to a new blog or whatever (it is), but here’s what they don’t tell you.

When your blog is new, forum marketing is a good way to get targeted traffic to it, but in order for it to be effective, you need to find the most-popular forum in your niche (can tell by the number of members) and have built up a reputation in the forum — can really pay off, will explain below.  This means interacting in the forum and answering peoples’ questions.

The only place you should put the url to your site is in the forum signature section.  You need to write short, catchy taglines that catch peoples’ attention and cause them to want to check your stuff out — without actually telling them to check your stuff out (against the rules on most forums).  In order to get your links seen as much as possible, you will need to interact quite regularly.   You also need to make sure that you are linking to a specific page on your site.

So, how can this pay off?  Well, one thing that I’ve noticed is that one forum I visit on almost a daily basis will send out a weekly (one I’m referring to goes out on Fridays, good b/c traffic tends to drop on weekend) newsletter of sorts to all of its members.  What does it contain?  It contains all of the most popular threads for the week — based on views, comments, etc.  If you are one of the first people to answer one (or multiple) question(s), you can easily get 50+ extra hits a day to your blog, which will in turn boost your sales!

So, the moral of the story is that when you’re sitting around and can’t think of anything you could be doing, do some forum marketing!  Until next time…