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 Do you need more traffic to your web
site, and more sales? If you do, then you need to consider
an often neglected side of web site promotion which is
called forum marketing.
Most web sites make use of forums to provide the element
of response from user to owner and vice versa. These
forums take many forms, and include the standard forums,
discussion boards, bulletin boards and currently blogs
where the visitors to the web site can leave their
comments on the site.
Marketing has always revolved around relationships. The
basic element of relationship from the aspect of online
marketing is to weave an element of trust between the
potential purchaser and the vendor or web site owner. Once
there is this element of trust, even the tiniest bond that
has been sown between the potential buyer and seller, it
becomes easier for the potential buyer to take a further
step to buy the product. That is why many marketers are
establishing forum boards and blogs to interact with
clients and to provide support and to answer queries.
These forum boards provide a fertile ground for you to
test out forum marketing for your products.
You need to compile a list of the discussion boards and
blogs that are related to your product or service line
that you are going to market. Then on a daily basis, visit
these forums to read their postings. These forums are the
best sites where newbies to internet marketing would
congregate to seek free resources, or request information
or advice from more experienced forumers. When you see a
post where you can respond, make a brief informative post,
and more importantly make sure you leave a reference to
your web site in your signature line. This confers on you
two advantages. Firstly, you gain a backlink to your site
when you leave your website address in a much visited
forum, and secondly, forumers who read your post will tend
to visit your web site by following the link in your post.
Some internet marketers channel all their visitors to a
squeeze page and not to a sales website directly. This
squeeze page is a sign up page where you get the email
address of the visitor in return for a free download of a
ebook or report or software. By using this squeeze page,
you gain targeted leads.
Statistics show a potential buyer would need to be exposed
at least 3 to 5 times before he becomes interested to take
the next step to purchase anything from you. By getting
his email, you can email him on a regular schedule or use
an autoresponder to channel your marketing message across.
The most important part of forum marketing is to identify
a group of marketing forums and blogs related to your
product or services that you are selling, from which you
can then launch off. Once you have the list of forums and
discussion boards, it becomes a daily affair to spend
enough time to visit these forums and to post to them.
Beware though, forum reading can be addictive, and you can
be spending a whole lot of time on reading and posting to
forums. Track your leads, and as you continue to do your
forum posting daily, you will see a steady increase in
your web site traffic and your sales.
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