Using Forums to Promote a Website

There is a right way and a wrong way to use a forum to promote a website. You should understand that a forum is essentially a community driven website. The information which is exchanged between the members of the community is being directly generated by experts within the forum and new members who are asking questions. Capturing the true essence of a successful forum marketing campaign can produce extremely targeted leads for your website.

Crossing over into the dark side of forum marketing is the use of what is labeled as “SPAM”. Avoiding being labeled as a “Spammer” is something that should not be forgotten at anytime. Like the saying goes, “Once a spammer, always a spammer”.

So what is the right way to use a forum for promoting a website?

The answer is that you should be promoting yourself, not the website!

If you are trying to promote a website on a forum, then you will almost always be seen as a spammer. So instead, you should be promoting yourself. Try to position yourself into the community as an expert of your niche. Offer advice and coaching for those on the forum who are posting questions or seem like they may be in need of help. If you can be looked up to as an authority figure in the niche, then people will want to listen to anything that you have to say. Your recommendations will be looked at as gospel. This is the effect that you want to have on the forum audience in order to produce effective marketing results.

Even if you don’t have much knowledge of your website niche, which is extremely bad in the first place, you can still offer helpful and accurate advice and information. If you are responding to a question or offering a word of advice to somebody who posts on a forum, you can always Google the question and read what you can find. Then take that information and come up with a good answer. This tactic alone can lead to a nice following from forum users. People love when there is a guru that they can go to and ask questions.

So go out there and locate a few good forums in your website niche and sign up for an account. Either post to the forum yourself, or hire somebody to do the posting for you. Before you know it, you will have another source of quality leads for your website. A good place to start? How about a shameless plug for one of my make money online forums.