Forum is an internet community that gathers to discuss, ask questions, provide answers, network and generally support fellow community members in a given niche. Using forum in internet marketing serve 2 purposes below:
1. Drive traffics (visitors) from the forum to the site you are promoting
2. Generate back links from the forum sites to your web site, which helps in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to get your website ranked high in the search engine
Here are the steps to follow in doing forum marketing:
1. Search for a forum related to your niche, preferably an active forum with lots of members actively participating in forum discussion, join the forum as member by filling up the registration form.
2. Update your profile with your personal information such as your location, age, hobby, etc. Some forum site also allows you to display a picture of your choice known as avatar. Updating your personal information is very important in building creadibility to your self.
3. Create a signature line which indicate your name and a clickable link to your website.
4. Browse throgh the forum post, look for topics of your interest, offer useful tips, helps, suggestions, opinions etc to the forum community by replying to the relavent post. You may also post questions in the forum and get feed back from the community.
Avoid doing the following:
1. Avoid spamming the forum by posting unrelated contents or website links.
2. Do not do hard selling by promoting your self, your products or services, especially if you are still new in the forum community, generally people do not want to be sold to.
How to look for a forum site ?
Simply do a search in Google with the phrase such as "dog training forum", "internet marketing forum", "sudoku forum" etc
Below screen shots show you some of the basic steps in forum marketing:
