While having a great sales page is very important in internet
marketing, what is vital is getting traffic to that sales page.
The best sales copy in the world is useless if no-one reads it.
A lot has been written about SEO and Web 2.0 content sites to
help build your traffic, so this article will focus on a more
demographic-specific form of traffic building: forums.
Internet forums, and their newsgroup predecessors, developed to
give like-minded people a place to discuss their favorite topics.
These topics can be anything from cooking to skydiving; whatever
you're looking for, there's a forum for it.
For the purposes of internet marketing, forums are an
invaluable research because they are entirely populated with
people who are already predisposed to buy your product.
To illustrate, say you are working with a product that teaches
people to build websites. If you go to a forum filled with web
design novices, then you have pinpointed potential customers,
making it more likely to get sales.
When using forums at a marketing tool, you have to remember one
key tenet: you must provide value in order for potential customers
to buy your product. This tenet is true in every other stage of
marketing, but doubly so on the forums. You cannot simply post a
bunch of links and expect people to click on them and buy your
product. You must post useful information to the topic at hand.
Continuing the example of web design, if somebody posts a
question about formatting images on a website, don't simply write
a post saying, "Buy this product," write something along the lines
of, "To format an image using HTML you do this, but if you would
like to bypass the hassle of manually formatting images each time,
you can try out some web design software like This Product.
It will cut your work time down on trivial things so that you
can focus on more important site issues." This provides the value
of knowledge to the members of the forum and also makes a soft
pitch for your product.
As you build a presence in a forum community, you will have
more people clicking your links because they will appreciate the
knowledge you contribute.
One final word: be sure to understand the forum's rules before
including too many links. Most will allow you to have a link in
your profile that you can lead to your site, but make sure what
the guidelines are before starting.
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