Read the Rules
It’s essential that you read the rules of forums. Forums are communities and most communities have rules and generally the rules will allow certain things and disallow other things. If you want to get booted from a forum simply just blunder in there and start posting away. It’s a sure fire way to get yourself some negative attention.
Clear Intent
Have a very clear intent. Why are you joining the forum? For most people it is to hang out with a light minded community. For us as marketers we see it as a traffic opportunity so if you are strategic, if you are going there to build links or to build your customer list, you’ve got to have a plan. I’m going to give you some strategy in just a second but just consider this, if you’re in this for profit or return on investment, you don’t get caught up too much in just hanging around aimlessly doing post for no reason so be very clear in your strategy.
Here are some strategy tips.
A real name will build you much more authority and trust in the community.
So when I use my real name on the internet I’ve always been very careful what I post under my own name but it’s super engaging. People can see your name, they recognize you. I’ve been a member of forums from 2005 and you can see here are a few forums that I’ve joined in 2006, 2007 and 2008. And when you add up all the posts, I’m guessing I’ve posted probably about 15,000 posts in different forums over the last 5 years. It would be an understatement to say I’ve made a 100,000 from that and I’ll show you why.
Make sure use an engaging picture.
In forums people keep seeing your picture every time you do a post so you want to put a picture that helps people identify you and get to know you because it’s just like the Gravatars we covered on blogs and your Facebook, all those same things come into effect on forums.
Most forums will give you a profile section where you can put a link to your website and a little bit of information. You could put a sales thing there and I suggest you put a trackable link to your website from there.
Discover Why Joining Forums can Be a Social Networking Traffic Source in the paid module of James Schramko’s Traffic Grab.
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