I’ve noticed something these past few months that I’ve been on the internet; the method of marketing products to sell or websites by posting on forum boards has increased dramatically.
The way it is done is someone who has a product to sell or website to promote registers on a site that has a forum board. Ideally that board will have a lot to do with whatever niche that person deals with thus making it easy to find customers.
Forum posting is becoming quite an effective way to generate traffic if you do it effectively. However I’ve noticed that there are a lot of forum posters out there who don’t know how to go about doing this, and their efforts go for naught.
I know this because I own a forum board myself, and I can’t tell you how many times I have had to delete entire threads because someone wasn’t following the rules or someone on the boards complained.
So speaking as a forum board owner, here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Make sure that the site you go to covers the topic or niche that you are promoting. If you are promoting a new way to find cheap Viagra or Cialis then a video gaming site should not be your first choice.
2. If you are going to post to a forum, make sure that your posts are done in the predominant language of the forum boards. If the language spoken on the boards is English, you don’t want to be posting in Russian or Italian (yes, I’ve had this happen).
3. Start small and build. Get to know the people on the boards before you start in with your advertising. If you just come in and try to start selling whatever it is that you’ve got, trust me, you will be flamed by the majority of people on the boards and you’ll have a bad reputation right away.
4. Start out with an ad in your signature line. Most sites will allow HTML in their signatures so you can place a link to your site or product there to start with. This is acceptable at most sites.
5. Be careful about what you post. There may be little kids at some of these forums so it wouldn’t be a good idea to promote someone’s porn site wherever you have a membership.
6. Don’t hijack someone else’s thread and try to promote whatever it is your selling. The only thing that does is make people on the boards very angry with you and you’ve lost hundreds if not thousands of potential customers.
7. DON’T SPAM!!!!!! I can’t say this enough. A lot of times when people post several ads in different places on a board it is considered spam and will be deleted. Not only that but your account will be banned and you wouldn’t be able to re-register because the Administrator has banned your IP address.
By following those simple tips you should have a pleasant and profitable experience promoting your product or site…
…and you might actually make some friends along the way.
