Marketing on Discussion Forums
ByDiscussion forums are a great place to get to network with like-minded people and express your expert opinions and answer questions for others. Many forums are heavily populated with users that log in a couple of times a week, and have a large subscribership. Most forums are broken down into a main topic and many sub-topics, attracting a narrow interest focus of highly qualified visitors. It’s for this reason that forums can be used as a great marketing tool.
As a member of a forum, it’s bad etiquette to simply try and sell from the forum discussions. In fact, leaving a URL to an outside website address in the post body itself can get you into trouble. But most forum mediators let members create a ‘signature file’ that is appended to the end of each conversation and response, that can help drive traffic to websites and information. These sites can be blogs, websites or affiliate products that each member has a chance to promote. Here is a snapshot of a signature file in a member’s post:
For a member like this, who has posted over 2000 times on this forum alone, think about the millions of people who have read these posts and possibly clicked on the links in his signature file at the bottom (clickable links in blue). And these clicks aren’t random — they are from people who are familar with this member’s expertise and trust what he has to say. How can you use forum marketing to your advantage?
