Brand Yourself In Forums

All newbies have questions, and one way to brand yourself in your niche is to help the newbies. In every few posts, mention your background. A question about dog grooming- Where can I find information about dog grooming? Might be answered like this: “Hi, I have owned my own dog grooming business for years, and what I tell my clients is…” Regular forum members will start to notice your presence and, when they need your product, will think of you over others. To make your reputation rise in the forum rankings, give solid answers that are short and informative. You might have to look something up to do this, but the answer to most beginner questions can actually be found on the same forum they posted the question in- in the archives.

Stay away from forum wars. If you have strong opinions, keep them to yourself. The point is to remain a friendly, informative poster who also happens to run an online store.

Make your signature an ad

When you post, make sure your signature has your store URL in it. You should also have a short, catchy slogan. Use this signature with every post. If the forum allows pictures, make sure you have a nice picture of yourself. This ‘human element’ cuts through the often stand-offish nature of the Internet and engenders trust.

Forum Marketing the Non-Traditional Route

Placing ads in forums that relate to your product is the traditional way to use forums for marketing your site. But there is another, cheaper way to do it– a way that might in the end be more effective for some products or services. It’s just this: become a reliable source of information on the forum.

You start by finding several forums that fit your product line. This isn’t hard for most of us. We already know what forums we like in our interest area. It takes just a couple of minutes on Google to find many others.

Evaluate Forums

Bring up the index for the forum (the page that lists topics and recent posts). You should see recent posts and topics. Too many means that topics and posts don’t ’stick’; they come and go so fast people don’t have time to read them. Too few and the forum isn’t reaching enough people to make it worthwhile.

An essential statistic to look at is ‘number of views’. Look for topics or questions you know something about that have a high number of views. This shows you that people are interested in those. When evaluating a forum, look to see that the number of views is healthy for the topic or subject you are going to post about.

You should also post a few questions yourself to feel out the forum. Do you get good answers in a timely manner? A forum that isn’t active enough won’t keep people coming back.

Look for Beginner’s Questions

Any good forum will have a large number of new people who want information about the basics. These are often irritating for the gurus to continually answer. You should jump on these for two reasons. By helping out someone who is new, you establish yourself as having a certain amount of expertise (which you do). Also, the questions new people ask are the ones that are going to get searched out later. So, when that particular topic is retired to the archives it is more likely to get pulled up by someone searching out information later. Newbie questions get asked over and over in slightly different, but related ways, create a series of answers that will aid in helping the newbie.

Join the Global Mentors Team, Today!