Advertising on Forums
While paid advertising exists on forum, nothing beats the free advertising online in forums that can only be had by regular posters to the forum.
This is something that you will want to do in any case – you will want to regularly visit forums that are frequented by your potential customers for a myriad of reasons.
Of course you want to talk to them, you want to establish your knowledge and your bonafides, and sell your product or service. But beyond that, you want to listen. A forum is the perfect place to eavesdrop on the conversations your customers are having with each other. By reading comments and posts at forums, you will learn about your market’s concerns and needs. And you will be on top of trends before they ever are talked about in the mass media.
As a double payback for being so close with your market, you will earn not only respect and interest in your business from new customers, but you will be able to advertise under every single one of your posts by making use of your forum signature. The signature, for those of you who haven’t noticed, is the link or comment you see at the bottom of many posts – each signature is unique to each commenter because they insert those links and comments via their control panel or settings in the forum.
If you sell advertising, and your link says “For great advertising rates click here” (or preferable something much better than that), many forum members will click on that link to visit your site. And many of them will buy advertising through your company. The numbers of people who click through will be directly proportional to the quantity and quality of the posts you write. You need the quantity just to get more eyeballs on your link. You need quality to establish yourself as someone they view as an expert. Someone they trust enough to buy from. Good posts that are useful to the forum members will actually presell your customers before they ever arrive at your website.
As a nice bonus to all of this, the links will be seen by Google as reaffirmations of your site quality, and will help lift your site higher in their search rankings.
So there you have it:
1- Inside customer information.
2-New customers through links.
3-Improved search rankings.
Forum marketing is the best online advertising you can get, in so many ways.