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Aggressive Marketing Through Forum Participation

We talked previously about passive marketing through forum participation and how time spent doing a fun activity, like participating in a forum, can pay off from a marketing standpoint. Passive marketing is a great technique in the battle for website traffic, but sometimes you need to take it to the next step.

Aggressive marketing through forum participation is not nearly as scary as it sounds. It is virtually the same as passive marketing but more focused and driven. Where in passive marketing through forum participation you were posting in forums that interested you as a fun distraction from work, aggressive marketing through forum participation is work itself.

Simply put, you need to identify forums whose members would make desirable traffic to your website. The forum itself could be covering the same subject as your site, or it could just attract users that would also find interest in what you have on your site.

You then need to establish a presence on these forums. This means that you will need to register and input your website address in either the signature file or profile, whichever the forum allows. Be careful, most forums don’t allow direct affiliate links in these places, so you’ll want to place links that direct to your website. What you do with the traffic once it gets to your site is up to you.

Now for the activity, you will need to post questions looking for guidance from the members of the forum you have chosen. Do not spam the forum with offers as this is not effective and you will not be thought of in very good terms. Ask questions, answer questions, provide insight, be an all-around good participant of the forum. You will want to frequent the forum at least twice a week for good results, this will instill confidence in you as a fellow regular member. With each posting you make, there will be an opportunity for a forum member to click a link to your website and hopefully convert into a customer for you.

The more forums you do this with the better the results will be. Don’t stop at just one forum, be a participant in three, five, seven, or more. Your questions and responses don’t have to be huge in length, but make them have some importance. If it makes it easier you could setup regular days that you participate in forums, say Monday nights and Thursday nights are your forum participation nights. A half hour each night, compounded by eight or more weeks in a row will do wonders to your traffic stats.

A few things to avoid:

Avoid forums with low membership. You want your links to your site seen by the most people possible.

Avoid forums with stale posting intervals. If it’s been months since the last post, that isn’t a good sign as far as how active the community is.

Avoid spamming or coming off too much like a salesman. This will not instill the trust that is needed to make members feel you are one of them.

Aggressive marketing through forum participation still has some elements of fun to it, but it is more focused as a marketing endeavor. The payoffs to this strategy are real, not imagined. Let it be one more weapon in your online marketing arsenal.