Forum Marketing - (A Subset of Link Building)

There are countless Forums online these days for all possible niches. (And if you can’t find one in your niche, Eureka! You’ve hit the jackpot! Start the first forum there and it’s like inheriting an oil well.) Identifying all the popular forums on your market or niche is a very important thing that all marketers should do for any online marketing campaign. For the really big, active forums with over 500,000 posts, simply go search for them by your keywords at http://www.big-boards.com.

Finding smaller forums is a little more tricky. Since there are many different software packages that forums are based on, there is no one good search command to find them all, except for adding the word “forum” to your search query. Try googleing each of your top five keyword phrases, in quotes, with the word forum slapped on the end, outside of the quotes.

Once you’ve found them, the big question becomes how you market to them without becoming a “spammer.” You will rarely find a forum, unless it’s strictly a “marketers’ forum” that allows you to post a blatent ad inside of them without it being deleted.