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.

FFAs or “Free For All” listings

Almost always a complete waste of time, FFAs simply let you post your Ad in either a classified
format or as a link in a link directory. Search Engines avoid these locations like the plague and being found in them can actually HURT your Search Engine rankings! Almost always, these listings do more harm than good. Beware!

Also see “Classified Ads.”

eZines you can advertise in Free

Easily confused with Safelists, there are many eZine services that sell Solo Ad mailings to their big, loosely harvested lists, and sometimes they’ll even offer a free emailing just to get your business. Of

course they want to sell you a much bigger eMailing down the road.

It is common to see an ad from a company that looks like a legitimate eZine “collector” company, offering a free Solo Ad submission to a list around the size of 5,000 – 50,000 recipients. I haven’t tested too many of these because of the hoops they make you jump through and the long lines you have to stand in.

In my experience, these companies have the power to collect and sort such a list out of their main, untargeted list and use it as described above in a sort of “bait & switch” routine.

I can’t verify if they all do business this way, but I have seen it happen more than once. The free mailing will go fine but you’ve got to buy a second mailing… So you choose a package, pay $67 or more for the mailing, and a month later when it’s your time to be featured, the much larger list doesn’t convert nearly as well as the little one did!

eZines - (Your own Newsletter, or your “List”)

If you’ve been marketing online more than a minute, I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with the phrase “the Money’s in the List.” Well it’s 90% true. It doesn’t end there; you still have to work at it. Keep giving to your list once you sign them up, much like a one-sided relationship.

If you ask any of the subscribers to my own list, I hope that they tell you I’ve been doing just that. 

So far, I haven’t had any more than one single unsubscribe, and I believe it is because my newsletter offers something for everyone, not just a new Advertisement each week. Anyone can send out a bunch of solo Ads from JV Partners and the affiliate programs that they’re pitching, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re interested in building a solid, trusting relationship with your subscriber base.

There are hundreds of places online that harvest email addresses, usually by some sort of co-registration, (where a person doesn’t even know he’s signing up for the second newsletter simultaneously) and will be glad to sell me a whole Solo Ad mailing allotment to that list of 200,000 or more for something like $50.

Sure, it sounds like a great deal, but what would it really get me? About 200,000 eMail boxes filled only with Ads that are no longer opened anymore.

eBooks - (A subset of List Building)

So, you wondered why I didn’t try to sell all the valuable information in this eBook, did you? The fact is that eBooks almost can’t be sold anymore, because every marketer and their uncle has penned at least one eBook lately and given it away!

Why would we do this? Well, it’s the same principle as Article Marketing, except that it builds more brand recognition and is much more dynamic. For instance, you’ve probably noticed an affiliate link or two throughout this PDF document. Some authors write these eBook just as a way to spread their Affiliate links alone. Some even pay a team of ghost-writers to crank out a bunch of eBooks for them to do just that, on a larger scale!

The most common use of eBooks nowadays and one that still works wonderfully for most niches outside of Internet Marketers, however, is offering a free eBook in exchange for your visitor’s eMail address. Like eBay, it’s a great source of targeted traffic. That’s it - you basically just bribe people to get on your list.