In forum marketing, credibility is everything. This all starts with your profile. Leave out the fluff. People will see through that. Don´t forget that in forum marketing you are usually dealing with a well informed crowd. Keep the descriptions in your profile close to home. Give real information about yourself and clearly state your experience and expertise. Also keep it personal. In forums, audiences tend to shy away from participants that are only there to do business. First give out to receive later.
Picking a forum to start engaging with an audience can be a daunting task in itself. Certainly when you are visiting forums with business in mind, you do not want to waste your time with forums that have little visitors and do not have an active crowd. AmbitionLifestyle tested several products to help pick niches, forums and blogs that would bring traffic to their client´s websites. Peter van Gameren, owner of AmbitionLifestyle is quoted saying: "We tested several products to meet demands of our clients to drive targeted traffic to their websites. Forum marketing is the way to do that for cheap. Our recommendations can be found in the Income Times Ten review on our AmbitionLifestyle website".
Apart from sales, forum marketing can bring you a lot of valuable information that you can use to grow your business or develop your product. People active on forums are usually informed and do not shy away from giving you feedback. If you see it as just that, feedback, as a business owner you can walk away from a forum with new insights on how to develop your product and grow your business.
Using forum marketing and blog marketing can be a very successful strategies promoting your business or affiliate offer. Forums contain one the most highly targeted, involved audiences you can find anywhere on the internet. Becoming a figure of authority on a forum can really help drive your business and promote your product.
A piece of advice when you are doing forum marketing is to spend some time picking your user name and avatar. You should pick a user name that stands out and relates to the subject you would like to be seen as an authority on within the forum you picked. The same is true for the avatar you choose. Ideally it enhances your credibility and states something about your expert status on a specific topic covered by the forum.
In forum marketing and blog marketing it is important to first have a look around before you start posting. Newbies usually have to proof themselves to the incrowd and people that are only in there to do business are given a cold shoulder. Participants in forums are passionate about the subject so selling to them is a no-no. Certainly if you are new to the forum. If however you are able to provide your fellow participants with valuable information, the ice is broken and people will start buying from you or invite you to do business with them. Once you become close with the influential participants, you can really see business coming from the forums taking off.
Targeting a blog or forum for forum marketing or blog marketing successfully, a few things have to be taken into account. First, the blog or forum of choice has to be as targeted as possible to the product, service or business you would like to promote. Second, you have to make sure the blog or forum you are targeting has a reasonable amount of traffic. Third, it has to have a core of active members and posts should be updated regularly. Fourth and probably most important, your information should be something unique and of high value to the audience visiting the blog or forum.
While forum marketing and blog marketing are usually promoted as free marketing, this is not the case. There is a tradeoff between your time spent and money. To engage with your audience, you or someone involved in your company has to take the time to get involved with the forums or blogs you have picked to become active on. So be sure when you pursue this form of marketing that you pick forums that have high traffic and an active crowd. "We had some challenges picking niches and forums to use to start driving traffic to our client's websites" van Gameren of AmbitionLifestyle says. "This meant we were looking for a method that helped us analyse blogs and forums to successfully drive traffic to client's websites from the get go. We use several programs to achieve this goal. We decided to review Income Times Ten on our website as it works for us".
When implementing forum marketing or blog marketing within your company, there are choices to be made. Although both forum marketing and blog marketing are free forms of marketing you will have to make choices as you are trading money for time. Both audiences on blogs and forums are active and only interact regularly with fellow active members. So just posting an affiliate link and moving on to the next blog or forum will not work. You can choose to outsource the work, trading money for getting back your time again. You can make it part of somebody’s work in the office or you can outsource to an outside party. At Fiverr.com you can usually find somebody to do the posting for you. Make sure to check out their references though before you hire. More on the outsourcing concept is explained in the AmbitionLifestyle Income Times Ten review.
When targeting forums or blogs, usually blogs have a bit higher authority when it comes to influencing people’s opinions about a business, service or product than forums have. All depends on the quality of the blog of course but there are some high quality blogs out there that function as review sites for their respective industries. People will look at that blog first to see whether a product is worth investing in or not. With that being said, if you have an influential member on a forum posting for you or promoting your brand you can certainly expect higher visitor numbers to your site. In both forum marketing and blog marketing, what blog or forum you target is paramount to your success in driving traffic and increasing sales.
Of course forum marketing can get highly targeted traffic to a website but don’t forget about its little brother, blog marketing. Popular blogs with an engaged crowd can also bring high volumes of traffic to a targeted website when it relates clearly to the subject of the blog. Obviously blog marketing is less interactive than forum marketing but comments you post seem to go a longer way. Because blog posting is more about statements than it is about interacting, comments you post stay up for a lot longer time. The right way to go about blog marketing is explained in the Income Times Ten review of AmbitionLifestyle.
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