It's no secret that forum marketing can bring qualified and buying traffic to your website. In this article, I'm going to cover some of the important reasons forum marketing should be a part of your business marketing plans.
Targeted Visitors
With forum marketing, you can narrow your marketing to the exact customer you’re looking for. As you probably know, there is a forum for most anything topic you can think of. This very fact gives you the opportunity to pull from pools of potential customers.
Find the forums most related to your product or service and you'll have access to some of the best traffic you can imagine. These people are on the forum because they are interested, and even passionate about its given topic. You couldn't find a more targeted group of people, all in one place.
Using the search engines with your niche or market keyword followed by "forum" should yield plenty of results to find your new customers.
Builds Trust
One of the biggest hurdles to getting your future customers to do business with you is earning their trust. Most people are hesitant in purchasing from someone they don't know. If they don't know you, they probably won't trust you, which means they are less likely to take the action you're looking for.
With forums, you can show you are a real person and with your postings, they will get to know you; at least on some level. When we get to know someone we start to trust them. Even better, with trust you’ll also enjoy higher sales or lead generation conversions. You'll sell more products or services and obtain more opt-ins.
Once you have visitor trust you'll see better returns even when your sales process is less than properly tuned. I've seen it happen time and time again, a marketer gets known and trusted and people buy without reading the sales copy. Believe me, it happens. It could happen for you.
Shows your Personality
Posting on forums allows you to show people your personality, good or bad, and when people get to know and like you they will be more likely to look at what you're promoting. I am of the thought that personality can be a huge selling factor. Not to mention, it can also be entertaining, which is what many of us want. Why do you think there are so many reality television shows? And why they are so popular? They are entertaining.
One last important tip is to make sure you market on forums that actually have traffic. There are so many dead or dying forums on the internet that are not worth wasting your time because you don't get a return for your effort. Forums seem like a great idea for their owners in the beginning, until they find out how time consuming they are, and many are left to sit idle.
Also remember to check recent posts on the forum you're looking to using for your marketing. While some forums appear to have an audience, sometimes they are just filled with spammers creating back links for SEO purposes. A quick check of posts will tell you if it's worth it or not.
