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Traffic Generation Tips - How To Use Forum Marketing
By: Christian Blake
Post Date: 2009-05-07
No matter what product or service you're selling, somewhere on the internet there is a group of people discussing their trials and tribulations regarding your product or service.
They gather together to share their triumphs and failures with their internet friends, all with the hope that they can discover viable information regarding your product and service. Now that you know people are talking about your service, why aren't you talking to them?
Forums are a great place to market your business. In fact, most forums offer vendors a direct means to advertise their product or service through either classified advertisements or banner advertisements. Usually you will find an obvious link for advertisers, such as "advertisers click here".
Some forums will allow businesses to advertise through a PPC platform. It stands for "pay per click", and you will pay a small amount of money for every click.
Other forums will will charge what is called CPM. It stands for "Cost Per Thousand". With CPM, you pay per thousand impressions. Even if nobody clicks on your advertisement, you will still pay. CPC is generally used for performance marketing while CPM is used for brand awareness.
Sometimes a forum will only offer advertising through an actual advertising network like Google Adwords, Adbrite, or Adsonar. For a forum owner, joining an advertising network removes the headache of managing advertising campaigns and organizing and tracking click costs. It is much easier to join a network such as Adwords and simply place the Adsense code on your website. Then a forum owner can allocate all of this time to running his website while Google tracks the click costs.
When you join any of the above mentioned marketing platforms, you can specifically select which websites will display your ads. This is typically referred to as "placement targeting". You and your competitors will be able to bid on ad positions on the exact sites you want to advertise your product. Your ad will only be displayed if you're the top bidder.
Outside of paying for actual advertising on a forum, you can also advertise directly on the forum when you are an active member. This is a very effective means of marketing your product or service, although it can be time consuming.
Most forums allow their registered users to have a personal profile. Within that profile there are usually two places to place a link back to your website: the homepage field and your signature section.
The homepage field is nothing more than a field to place an active link to your website. It usually doesn't include a description nor can you use it to place anchor text; it will only contain the actual URL to your website.
The signature field allows much more room for marketing your website, services, products, or any combination of the three. You can actually pitch your product in your signature with at least two or three sentences and then follow up with one or two links to your website, including anchor text.
It's important to remember to always follow the forum rules when you are marketing your business. It's considered spam to make a new post that's specifically about pitching your services (unless it's authorized by the moderator and/or posted in a specific section such as "the spam zone").
The best way to market in a forum is to actively participate and provide useful information with every post. Write a solid pitch for your business and or services within your signature. Then, let your signature do the marketing for you. If you take the time to honestly help other members of the forum, you will generate traffic to your website and ultimately develop new customers.
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