About Forum Participation

What is a Forum?

Participating in Forums can provide valuable insight to business owners. Not only for sales, but for some good perspectives from others in your industry as well as potential clients. Forum marketing is not always going to provide you with instant gratification though. It takes time to build a credible profile, and when participating in a forum you can wind up giving more information than you gain. However, despite all of this there are still some benefits of participating in forums. The main benefit is for you to build up a strong profile and use your profile to help others and you in your business.

What are some of the BENEFITS OF FORUM participation?

Building A Network. Getting or being involved in forums is a great way of creating a network for yourself. It is a great way to keep up with industry news or something that your customers or potential customers are interested in. This buiding of a Network, won’t happen overnight and you will be pleasantly surprised when you do build a network of people.

Direct Selling Being a member and regular participant of Forums can be used to assist you in making direct sales from forums but is not your main purpose. This will not be your primary goal to do this and let me highlight it is not the major intent of the participation. Some participans will be looking for learning about some product or service and asking for a recommendation form Forum Members. In that case, you can offer your opinion and voluntary recommend a product or service that you know will help. This can be a link with an good explanation behind it.

Test Audiences. Get others to think about what you have written in your blog, product description, by putting it forward to the forum audience. 

Powerful Recommendations. Before you purchase something, be it an expensive appliance, a laptop, expensive TV it is only natural to find out more about what you might to be purchasing. You can use forums to gain more understanding and opinions on practically anything. Go to google and type the chosen topic or product + Forum. You’ll be surprised at the great number of Forums that are out there for any product and service.

How do You go about Participating in a Forum?

Introduce Yourself. Introducing yourself needs to be the very first step.  Give a little background about yourself and DON’T jump in and start posting your opinions. Always let the existing participants of the forum to welcome you into the Forum site. Make sure you always let them know you are genuine and their to participate in the forum as a participant and forum member.

Do Not Self Promote.  If you mention even in a non promotional way or keep mentioning a few times what you do, this will not be a good thing from the point of view of the forum. Most forums have searchable profiles. so you don’t have to keep promoting yourself. At the end of the day, if someone is seeking you out, or begins to trust you, it is more than likely they will look up your profile to get an idea of what you’ve posted before. DO NOT go dropping links to your website or blog or appear to overrun memebr with spam. It might actually get you into trouble by other forum members reporting you and member forums may not wish to communicate with someone who they can’t trust. Always ensure that you have read and understood the terms and conditions of use for the forum you have joined and have chosen to participate in. For some Forums, self promotion can result in banning from the Forum!! So be careful. Also, be careful of Forum Trolls which in Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community ..

Avoid Attacking other participants. Always try to steer clear of Drama which is inevitable in forums. Forums by their very nature are a place to have open discussions about topics. Posting your personal opinion on something is fine, but to attack others personally will not establish you with a good reputation and will backfire later.

Always Be Helpful When You Can. You may be on the forum with one intent of promoting your product or service. However, if you have knowledge on something about a subject that is being discussed by all means offer some advice, your knowledge and insight. This is vitall when you are trying to establish yourself as a resource and a person who is knowledgeable for a product or service.

Remember it takes time to build an honest rapport within the forum members and Forum Communitywho are inevitably going to be protective of their forum. Let’s face it, as users or members of any groups we really don’t want groups or forums to be overrun with spam and link drops and “Forum Trolls”.
Forums can be a great resource on many levels and may just provide you with the extra push that you need to get more in touch with the product or service of an audience.

I am sure you must have enjoyed reading this post and no doubt it has increased your understanding of Forums and Forum Marketing.

To Your Success

Sofina