PML Media

Forum Marketing – how to do it properly

Forum marketing can be a powerful medium to promote your company, services and get you out there in front of a wider audience. It’s also a high ROI strategy as; let’s face it you’re among experts and professionals in targeted areas.

Find the right forums for your market

So how do you use forums to get the best results? Successful forum marketing means finding the right ones for your specific community, as not all of them will be right for you and will be a waste of your time.

Start by searching for the most popular which cover your market sector. You can try searching forum hub sites such as Board Reader, Big Boards, and Board Tracker using niche specific keywords.

Start by narrowing your list to between 5 to 10 forums that will be worth your time and effort:

• Look for forums that have at least 1,000 members and 10,000 posts.
• Make sure the forum gets at least ten to fifteen new posts on a daily basis.
• Ignore forums that are overrun by spam.
• Avoid forums hosted by your direct competitors.

Making a valuable contribution

Make you presence known, be the leader in your respected field. And make sure your comments and posts are valuable to the community. Read through posted question and post answers, remember, you ARE a leader in your field and must come over as one.

If this is an area you feel would benefit you, identify which forums you want to use and register as soon as possible. Users with seniority or older registration dates are given more difference than newer users.

“Effective forum marketing means that it is part of your long-term strategy. Think of forums as a permanent marketing channel for your business, instead of just one of many targets to blast your hot new advertising campaign.” – Gregory Go

If you would like more ideas on kickstarting your marketing strategy for 2010, sign up to our free download by filling in the boxes on the top right of this page!

Mike

Based in Kent, I work with companies and individuals to boost their online presence. As an Internet marketing consultant my work covers many areas of inbound marketing from strategy and planning, content creation, email automation social media and much more. Outside of this you'll find me with my 2 German Pointers on Ashdown Forest.

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