Forum marketing is one of the most useful strategies when marketing because, your going to allow yourself to drive related traffic to your site. For example, if I ran a webmaster resources site, a webmaster forum such as DigitalPoint would be a great place to start.

Note: I’m not saying spam the forums! I’m saying use the forums effectively to promote your site(s).

How Can Forum Marketing Be Effective For Me?

The first thing you need to do is fire up Google, since they are the #1 Search Engine this is a pretty decent place to start. Using Google, you should search for a forum using your main keywords i.e a webmaster resource site would Google “webmaster forums”, there they can find links to webmaster forums and join the most popular ones. The reason you should join the most popular ones is usually because, they are the most active. However, I’m going to say look for activity in the place too, since a forum may have 50k members but no activity.

You should also see if the forum allows you to have links in your signature because, if they don’t then your not going to be showing a link in every single one of your posts unless you place it there (and most forums which don’t allow them remove the links anyways).

Talking about links on forums, you can link to your site in your forum posts as long as you don’t overdo it, as this constitutes as spamming. If your not 100% sure on this, then you should read the forum rules and browse through some posts inside the forum, as this can aid you in finding exactly what is acceptable self-promotion in that particular forum.

Time = Money. So in order to save time you can rewrite some of your content and post them on forums, this will make search engines such as Google happy meaning they will index them, since they don’t like duplicate content.

I’m not talking about joining these places, promoting your site and leaving as this isn’t going to be most effective, what you need to do is actually participate in the “community”.  What I mean by this is, don’t just start threads join in other threads by posting i.e answer questions and give your opinion on other forum threads. Since forums are even more “community” oriented than blogs, you have to join in with the “community” whenever you do forum marketing.

During forum marketing, your going to meet some webmasters in your specific niche. This is the time you start to network! This means set up a  joint venture or link exchange and if your running a blog you can offer guest posts or interviews

Remember the rules when forum marketing:

- Participate in the community
- Network with fellow webmasters in your niche
- Create a signature with a link to your site
- If you run a blog, and the forum allows blog feeds to be shown post that too!
- Build up your reputation (participate in the community, the more you post = more people will respect you usually and more you can promote your sites easier.)

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