Establish Your Authority And Presence Online Through Forum Marketing
Next to article marketing, the one thing that I spend a lot of time on and you should start doing right now is forum marketing. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this and you must do it right the first time or you will be seen as a spammer with no credibility and only trying to get your link seen and clicked by people.
Forums drive traffic to your website because they allow you to place a signature link in the bottom of your post. When people read your post and you deliver some kind of answer to their question they might notice your call to action in the signature link. They then click on it and are brought to your website or lead capture page. Our goal is to get people to sign up for the Residual Wealth Factor e-course so this is the link that we will be promoting.
There exist forums on virtually every know topic online. What we will be doing is joining forums that are related to our niche so we want to find forums that are related to MLM, network marketing, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, web hosting, domain names, making money online, business opportunities, etc…
It is a good idea to join under two different user names. One will be for asking questions and the other will be for answering questions. Try and spent anywhere fro 20-30 minutes every day hanging around the forums and posting. After awhile people will start to recognize your name and associate it with trust and authority. When you have this kind of reputation, people will be more willing to buy from you or sign up for your program, in this case sign up for GDI.
Before we get more into forum marketing, I want you to download this free program called “Forum Fortunes”. This neat little program makes it possible to organize all of your forum marketing campaigns and saves your user names and passwords for all of the forums you belong to. It also lets you bookmark forum posts and keep track of all of the conversations you have going on at one time. It’s shareware, but I think you can also buy it for real cheap on eBay. That’s where I got it from. I am not sure if this version of it expires or not.
Click here to download Forum Fortunes 3.0 Free
Setting Up Your Signature File
After joining the forum that you choose, you are going to go to the user profile manager and update your signature link. Some forums let you use HTML, but some run on another forum code called BBCode which is very similar.
Here is an example of a signature that I use using BBCode and HTML:
BBCode ==> [URL=”http://www.moneyflowforlife.com”]Click Here For The *FREE* “Residual Wealth Factor” 7-Day Net Marketing Secrets e-Course[/URL]
HTML Code ==> <a href=”http://www.moneyflowforlife.com”>Click Here For The *FREE* “Residual Wealth Factor” 7-Day Net Marketing Secrets e-Course</URL>
Anything in between the tags will be anchor text and become clickable. I suggest you take a look at other people’s sigs and see how they do it. Come up with your own unique tag line. Try to avoid anything that sounds like hype or too far fetched. You need to put some kind of call to action like we do in our article resource boxes. Always try to offer something free like a free trial offer or a free e-course like the one above. Don’t just put in something like “Click here to work at home”. Our main goal is list building with the signature file.
Begin To Answer And Ask Questions
When you first join a forum go to the section where it says introduce yourself and tell people why you are there and what you do. You then want to simply browse around the different threads and look for popular discussions and take part in them. If you don’t know how to answer someones questions, look around for answers in other forums and come back and answer in your own words.
Try and make medium sized posts and don’t just write one or two sentences. This will only make it look like you are trying to post only to get your signature seen. It is also in your best interest to write a long post because it can be picked up in the search engines and bring you more traffic.
Tip: When you are doing keyword research in Google, take note of any forum threads that may be in the top 10 listing. You can then join that forum and add to the thread and your link will now be in a thread that is indexed on the first page of Google. This is a sure way to find a thread that receives a lot of free traffic. We will cover this technique later on.
Every time you post you are also gaining a backlink to your website which is good for search engine optimization. The more backlinks you have to your website, the more search engine traffic you will get.
Where To Look For Forums?
You can simply go to Google and type your keyword in quotes followed by the word forum.
Example: If I were looking for forums on network marketing I would type in: “network marketing” forum
It will return all related forums with the word network marketing.
Here Is A Big List Of Forums With High Traffic To Get You Started:
1. Digital Point
2. Web Master World
3. The Warrior Forum
4. Network 54
5. Search Engine Watch
6. Internet
7. A Best Web
8. Associate Programs
9. Web Pro World
10. E-Consultancy
11. Mike’s Marketing Tools
12. Conquer Your Niche<== Get free ad credits for posting on this one!
13. How To Corp
14. Free Advertising Forum
15. I Help You
16. Clickbank Success Forum
17. IM4 Newbies
18. Willie Crawford Forum
19. Geek Village
20. Anthony Blake
21. Mike Filsaime’s Forum
That should be enough to keep you busy for now. In the future I am going to be setting up my own forum just for everyone on my team so we can communicate easier and share ideas.
Don’t forget to send out your weekly solo ads! This is the fastest road to the top in addition to the free advertising methods I am showing you here.
To the top!
Daniel
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