Forums : Free Traffic Method
Proper forum marketing is extremely effective at sending laser-targeted traffic and clicks straight to your landing page. It’s also great because it’s totally FREE, and can be implemented at anytime all throughout the day. Most of you may already have a good concept of what forum marketing is, but for those that don’t, please let me explain…
Forum marketing is simply the process of providing highly relevant and helpful comments within high-traffic marketing forums. Each post you make will contain your “signature” which you can edit to contain the link to your viral landing page.
There’s no doubt that people reading forums definitely pay attention to signatures, and often click on one’s that possibly interest them. This has been proven for YEARS, and will always be one of the most reliable ways to send targeted traffic to any page you want. Used properly, and this method can make you a very decent online income while growing your list exponentially at the same time.
How To Use Forums
Just like with any kind of marketing, there’s a right way and a wrong way to market your offer on forums. If you don’t do things properly, you can easily run the risk of having your account banned and your threads/posts deleted.
It should be common sense to all of you that it’s not appropriate to sign up to forums and start spamming your links all over. This will be counterproductive for you, and the results will be dismal. Not only that, but posting your links anywhere but your signature box will usually get your account banned. But by providing valuable, helpful content within a forum, will you be able to earn the trust of those visitors and readers who may be most interested in what you’re offering.
Effective Forum Marketing
That said, here are my TOP strategies for using free, effective forum marketing:
1) Post Daily, Post Often, Stay Consistent – Set a daily goal for the number of posts you want to make in EACH forum that you’ve chosen for your marketing. My recommendation is to choose at least 5 high-traffic forums and post at least 5 quality posts and 1 quality advice thread each day. That’s a total of 30 posts per day.
By no means do I suggest doing the minimums, but instead set your own goals, whether that be 50 or 100 or whatever. Quantity is what’s important here, so that means you can post in sections like “Off Topic”, “General Discussion”, “Discussion Lounge”, etc. You can bust out lots of comments like this since it’s usually just casual conversation and goofing around, but since the ENTIRE forum is made up of the target audience you’re looking for (affiliates, internet marketers, make money online seekers), your sig will still be just as visible and just as clickable!
2) Ask Compelling Questions – A great method to get tons of views and clicks to your signature link is to come up with a compelling question about internet marketing, and ask for the input from other affiliates and marketers.
It’s best to ask something that doesn’t require tons of technical knowledge, or one that only a few select people may have a good answer to. Keep your questions more broad and general so as to attract input from more people.
Also, to give you some good ideas on the type of posts that attract the most attention, just pay attention to threads that are already getting the most number of views and replies. View them and read the original post to try and see what they did to illicit so many views and replies to their thread.
3) Offer Useful Advice – If you take only a few minutes in a forum, you’ll be able to easily identify many questions other marketers are looking for advice on. It’s one thing to just answer their questions in each post, but it’s quite another to start a new thread that addresses the problem and offers
advice on the topics that are being asked about.
This is simple to do, even if you’re a newbie internet marketer and don’t yet have answers to all of the questions being asked. Simply take the questions or topics and search Google for the answer. You can easily and quickly find the answer to nearly any question like this, and then return to the forum to post the advice that you just discovered. Just be sure to reword it and not plagiarize someone else’s content. You may need read through a few articles on the topic in order to get the viewpoint of multiple people, and then create your own thread post based on what you learned.
Remember – it’s ok to take the appropriate amount of time to construct a good forum thread. Popular threads can stick around for weeks, months or even YEARS. That in turn will create a steady, ongoing stream of visitors to whatever link is in your signature box.
You can now become a “trusted” member of each forum simply by researching common problems/questions, and posting helpful replies that offer advice. Depending on the forum, threads you create like this can stay bumped to the top of the list for days, weeks or even months in a row – this means steady, consistent clicks and traffic from your signature link.
