Steps in Building a Successful Online Business – Part 3

Here’s another way to drive more traffic to your website and increase your visibility.

Step Three: Forum Marketing

There are thousand of forums on the internet, each with a different topic. There are forums for making money online, internet marketing and online business related. There are also forums on computers and IT. The topics and niches are wide and far.

If you’re in a particular niche and want to extend your reach, getting involved in forums is a great way to do so.

Here’s what you need to know when participating in a forum:

Provide value to the conversation
There’s no such thing as a dumb question, so just ask
DO NOT blatantly advertise yourself, your products or affiliate products
If you’re allowed to have a Signature file, then make good use of it
Use your keywords in the anchor text of your links in your Signature file
Participate! (that’s a duh!)

Okay, you get the idea. The problem now is finding a forum to get involved with. The easiest way to do this is to just do a search in Google for whatever niche or topic you’re interested in. Say you sell dog supplies and want to find dog forums, so just search for “dog forums” and see what comes up. I haven’t actually done that search, so I have no idea if there are any. I would assume so, though.

My area of interest is internet marketing, so I like to participate in forums that have to do with internet marketing and making money online. Here are the forums I participate in: The Warrior Forum, Conquer Your Niche Forum, Evan Carmichael Entrepreneur Forums, Jeff Casmer’s Work At Home Forum and the PIPS Power Group Forum (Private members only forum for Plug-In Profit Site members).

Here are some resources that may help you in finding an appropriate forum for your topic of interest:

Once you find a good list of forums, it’s time to get to work. Start participating and provide value and be of help to others. Get your questions answered and answer other people’s question. Get involved!

If you haven’t done so yet, read the first two steps in building a successful online business:

Steps to Building a Successful Online Business – Part 2

Steps for Building a Successful Online Business – Part 1

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Tags: Forum Marketing, forums, online business

7 Comments

Leon Bowes says:

October 26, 2008 at 4:58 PM

Great series Alan

I am seeing more and more “visitor paths” in StatCounter from forums outside the WF and PPG. The more you participate, the more hits I am seeing.

Thanks for the post (And Congrats to your PSU)

Leon Bowes

[Reply]
Alan Mater
Twitter: AMater

I get quite a bit of traffic from forums. The key is posting useful and informative information.

[Reply]
TonyB says:

April 1, 2009 at 7:17 PM

Hi Everyone,
I have a carpet cleaning business in Houston,TX that was doing pretty good until the economy went bad, and with it my clientele. I have a website for the business but I dont know what I have to do the get it to show up in a search. Right now it’s somewhere in the yahoo/google netherworld (LOL).

Is there someone on here that can give me some insight or know of anyone that coud give me insight on how I can get my local website on the front page of a Yahoo or Google search to increase my business without it costing me 5 or 10k $$$? If so please share with me.

I thank you and my hungry over-eating children thank you.

thanks,

Tony

[Reply]
Alan Mater
Twitter: AMater

Hi Tony,

The first thing I recommend doing is finding your target market. Are you looking for local and regional business for your carpet cleaning company? If so, you want to target the same area when marketing online.

In order for your website to show up in a search, you have to optimize your site for the search engines. If you don’t know how to do this I recommend you grab a copy of Suzanne Morrison’s 3 Steps to Search Engine Success ebook at http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/seo-made-easy.html.

After you optimize your site, start building backlinks to your site through article marketing, blog commenting, forum participation, etc.

[Reply]
almir says:

April 24, 2009 at 12:24 PM

wow Alan i enjoyed reading this post it contained a lot of useful ideas. It was also cool that you provided a list of dofollow forums which will check out i’m not a current member of any forum yet because i always underestimated its effectiveness so i now got some work to do .

almir’s last blog post..Vital Tips That Can Aid Any Blogger

[Reply]
Alan Mater
Twitter: AMater

@almir, Forums are very effective. You can get direct traffic as well as search engine traffic. Plus, making good use of your signature will drive your website rankings up. I will be making a post on this very shortly, so stay tuned

[Reply]