Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Free and Effective Marketing

Delano Oladapo, Qvate Strategic

Use Forum Marketing to Promote Your Website.

If done correctly, forum marketing can be a powerful and free marketing tool Forum marketing is definitely one of the most effective forms of free advertising available today. If you’ve got time on your hands, but no money to advertise, leveraging forums to promote your products, services, or website should be part of your daily routine.

The concept behind forum marketing is simple. You act as if you are not selling anything (which in fact, you are not!). All you are doing is interacting with people that match the product you are promoting and are therefore likely to buy it if they look at the offer. Your offer is appended to your signature automatically in every post you make.

Here’s a sample signature you can use:

Still trying to get your site to rank #1 on Google
I’m not - Click here to find out why…
http://marketingscoop.com

Your job in forum marketing is to simply be engaged and have fun. Really there are no catches here, no strange angles. The only thing you can’t do is talk openly about the product you are promoting because it just doesn’t work.

Here are five approaches to successful forum marketing:

1. Answer questions. If you’re an expert on the topic, you can easily help people who ask questions in the forum.

2. Ask a question. If you’re not an expert on the topic (i.e. internet marketing) there must be a lot of things you want to know. This is a quick and legitimate way to add a lot of posts to any forum.

3. Ask for a critique. Say you write an article and post it in your blog. Make a quick post to ask what people think. You’ll not only get exposure for your signature. You’ll also get a good back link to your blog.

4. Ask for an opinion. If you come across a product or service and want to research it first, forums are a great way to get direct feedback. For instance, you could make a post that says, “Has anyone had any experience with this product…?” It’s that simple. Just go to ClickBank and ask about every product in the marketplace!

5. Offer an article. You wrote an article, published it to your blog, and asked for a critique in the forums. Now go back and make a post offering your article for publication with the condition that they leave your resource box intact.

There are a variety of forums out there. To get started, visit one of the high-traffic forums below and sign up for an account.
AssociatePrograms.com - Affiliate Marketing Forum
eWealth.com - the #1 Affiliate Hangout
Money Maker Group - Forum About Making Money
Work at Home - Work at Home Business Forum

Next, log in and update your Profile. This is where you can add your signature which will appear at the end of every post you make. Read the rules about posting. Basically, you either ask specific and relevant questions or you answer questions by replying to posts that other members make.

Start by looking at what others are posting and how people are replying to those posts. Once you get a feel for it, post as much and as often as you can. Never advertise in your posts (except where permitted). Let your signature do the work for you.

You can get a surprisingly large amount of sales from affiliate links that were posted in forums on discussions about the programs you promote. You should say something positive about the product and then ask if anyone has heard of it.

There are a lot of newbies posting in forums who are desperately seeking direction to help them start making money online. Whenever you see a post like that, reply and say, “Hey - Check out this site…” and explain how it really helped you. Make sure you leave your affiliate link in your signature.

*Dapo Delano is the principal at Qvate Strategic a brand policy firm with specialization on brand strategy and creatives. He has worked on brands raging from fast growth start-ups to blue chips multinational. He has a passion for branding from the inside-out.

Related Topics: Branding, Business, Computers, Customer Service, Design, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Marketing, PR, Technology    1 Comment    

Social Media 101

Patrick Mason, SocialMedia404.com

Social media tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter have been in the press a lot for their ability to deliver business results faster than ever before. We have all heard the story about something going “viral” and becoming a sensation overnight. Unfortunately, results like this cannot be guaranteed. To get the most out of these new tools, it is important to understand why, how and where you will use them, and to make sure that you are not just jumping on the bandwagon in the hopes of instant success. While you may achieve it, it is far more likely that you will not without a little planning up front.

If you are thinking about using social media for you business, OASIS is a simple five-step process that will help you get started. Below is a brief overview of the five key steps in OASIS.

1) Objectives: Start planning for your project by picking a clear objective. Perhaps it is to increase sales or maybe it is to reduce customer support costs. Whatever your goal, make sure it is clear before you start.

2) Audience: Next, define the audiences that need to be involved to make it happen and list their on-line habits. Are they mostly into e-mail, do they read Blogs, participate in any forums? If you don’t know, ask them. If you are still not sure, there are plenty of free tools around that will give you some basic information about who is on-line and where. If in doubt, here is a basic primer on social media research as well as some other resources to get you started.

3) Strategy: The next step is to figure out who you want to connect and why. For each group, determine how can you best reach them, and also think about how they can best reach each other. For example to increase sales your strategy might be; “We would like existing customers to tell new customers how they can implement/configure/ use our products”, or if you are trying to reduce service costs you might say “We would like to capture the knowledge our customers have in troubleshooting our product so other customers can start solving their own problems.”

4) Implementation: Once you have a good sense of how you and your audiences will interact, the next step is implementation. This is where you determine how everyone will connect to achieve your objective. Given the huge range of possibilities, you would be best to do a little homework to see how others have accomplished similar goals in the past. For example, blogs have been used very successfully to both increase sales, and reduce customer service costs. Blogs are able to disseminate information to many people at once. What’s more, recipients can comment on articles, creating more content for others to read. This can be ideal for both sales and service objectives. Here is a great list of examples of how others have used these techniques in their business.

5) Sustainment. If you have successfully implemented steps #1-#4 above, chances are you have started some new conversations with your customers and other stakeholders. As such, it is important to define how you will end (or not) your social media project. Some projects like building a house have a natural end. Others like publishing a newspaper do not. What will be important for you is to decide how you want to manage yours. If it has a natural end date let people know, if not, prepare to manage it for the long haul. Good luck!

For more information, advice and free social media tools, feel free to visit our blog, or drop us a line.

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