Jordan Hardy

Marketing on Forums

Posted on: October 2, 2009 by Jordan Hardy Comments Off

I often find it interesting how useful vs. useless forum posting can be as a marketing strategy. For example, one of the message boards / forums I run has quite a large number of people that apply to become members each day. Of these applications, I find that 92% have no intention of posting relevant content. They just want to market their product in categories that are not relevant. I deny these people becoming members as clearly these days there are online tools to see who is going to be a real participant on a forum. These tools search existing forums to see if particular members, based on their email addresses, are relevant or not.

My thought on the best way to market on forums is to not waste time. If you have a product to market and want to talk about it on forums, have something to say. Sure, SEO strategy and keywords can help, but most importantly have a point. By posting on forums with relevant helpful information to others, a link to your product can be clicked more often when trust is built. People figure things out. If a person is just thinking they will be smarter than everyone and find clever ways to sneak in selling, it will rarely work. Conversion rate will decrease, other members may not interact as much with you, and the message board moderator may even remove any member that is detracting from the point of the message board.

I’ve posted on forums over the years, testing conversion with many techniques. Although quite a lot of strategies help, a base belief in adding to the forum is needed for success.