How about a way to get a ton more traffic right now… free… (okay, with a little effort).
In all my years marketing on the internet and having created more than 700 websites, more than 200 products having trained 10’s of thousands of people around the world in live audiences in leveraging the internet and on pace this year to do $26 million in business… I have yet to see a faster or more powerful free method (or paid) way of generating traffic than correctly doing forum marketing.
Some may argue the point with so many new social media channels available like Twitter.
However, the same three things that has driven successful forum marketing are the same three things today that drives all successful social media marketing… as you’ll see in a few seconds below.
Today’s Forum Marketing Checklist will give you some specific steps you can take.
What I’d like to do here is give you a brief summary of both the free way and the paid way to do effective marketing with forums.
However, before I do I think its important that you understand the underlining structure of what makes this method tick and work.
Be it Forums, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. They are channels. Nothing more, nothing less. What sustains these channels are the three primary drivers I’m about to give you so…
Write down and remember these three primary drivers.
Communities
Conversations
Content
These are the three primary drivers of the internet today.
Communities of people that gather in forums, on blogs etc.
The nature of the conversations they are having.
The content that is driving those conversations.
You, as a marketer must align yourself with these three drivers and come in as the “4th-C” if you expect to get any profitable traction.
This 4th-C is…
Contributor
You must come in and contribute something of value to the community, the conversation, the content …or ideally, all three.
You can easily go into any forum, right now, today for free and win if you do it correctly.
Here are 5 very general ways to make a contribution correctly to put you in a winning position with forum marketing.
Answer a question (intelligently)
Provide a link to a relevant & helpful resource (not your self promo stuff)
Provoke a new line of thinking (challenge certain assumptions)
Kiss butt (be agreeable)
Kick Butt (be disagreeable, respectfully and intelligently)
As for paid forum marketing.
This is simple. It rocks, the traffic rushes to your site and the conversions are crazy!
Here are 3 simple steps.
Compile a list of forums in your market (I have a list of over 200 forms for make money, mlm, work at home, internet marketing etc that I use)
Check to see if they have Google AdSense (or banner ads) above the fold.
If yes, then simply do Placement Targeting of your AdWords or Image ads on those forums.
Forums are some of the most active places on the internet. So when you find forums around your topic that have Google Ads on them, you can directly and specifically target ads to that forum to start sucking in traffic like a hoover vacuum.
Of all the places you can target paid ads, I have yet to find anything that beats an active forum in generating thousands of visitors for pennies on the dollar.
Now of course getting the traffic is one thing, you need to be able to convert the traffic into subscribers, buyers or whatever it is you’re looking for.
So make sure you have a conversion process in place to catch all of this targeted traffic.
With that said, here are 2 quick places you can use to start locating forums in your market.
http://www.theforumfinder.org
http://directory.big-boards.com
more will come on this strategy be on the look out
