How to Increase the Effectiveness of Forum Marketing

With the social networking revolution upon us, it looks like blogs and discussion forums are the latest targets of the SEO experts. In this area, we cannot overlook the use of forums for marketing our client’s products or services. However, it pays to follow an intelligent and planned strategy even in this instance.

To use forum marketing through the Internet, you have to join a forum and begin by adding posts to the discussions. It is better to do this where the discussion or thread is in some way connected to your product or service. Then you can in the course of discussion post a link to your product while extolling its benefits. It is best not to overdo the same as it will be regarded as spamming. Some webmasters and moderators remove all such posts so your efforts will go to waste. However, if you state your point logically and advertise your wares quietly and without fanfare, it may be allowed to remain on the website.

Another method you can use is to create your own signature file, in which you can hyperlink a keyword phrase back to your website. Readers clicking on the linked words tend to get directed to your site. This is also more ethical as it is a visible choice of the readers.

It is important to remember that when you make a forum or blog post you may be helping out someone. This is a great feeling and especially if the product or service is really good and genuine, it will improve someone’s life for the better. It also takes away the negative feeling of just having to push the marketing effort.

You can learn a lot for free. Obviously people on a forum have a host of different problems and difficulties. Some are looking for solutions while others provide the solutions. When such stories or incidents are exchanged they can add to the knowledge and experience base of others, enlightening them on different ways to deal with a problem or even related problems. It’s a great way to increase your knowledge.

Forums can be a targeted source of free advertising. When relevant people read your posts, view your signature profile and click on the link for your website, they may have a need for your product or service and thus contribute to more sales revenue.

Being regular and consistent in SEO and marketing efforts pays off. You can post articles, press releases, links, comments, get credit for back links by search engines etc. all in the course of a day’s work. Any and all of these can serve to increase your rankings and put you higher up on the search engine result pages in Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Regular review and analysis of rankings is very necessary to maintain your competitive edge