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4 Steps To Effective Forum Marketing

In my last post, I discussed the importance of finding what people want first before actually going out there and creating your products and services.

And a great way to accomplish this is by visiting forums and see what the people there are saying (or complaining).

In this post, let’s take a look at some of the tricks on how to do effective forum marketing to market our products and services.

Before we begin, it’s important to take note that you’re not going to blatantly sell your products and services. If you do that, then disaster is going to fall upon you as you’ll be banned on the first day in the forums!

How do you market your products and services then?

Well, here’s a step-by-step system on how to do effective forum marketing:

Step 1:

Read the forum rules first before you do anything else, especially the rules concerning your forum signature.

You don’t have to spend ages reading the rules. Just scan them quickly and make sure you understand the expected code of conduct in the forum.

Step 2:

Create your forum signature.

Here are some tips on creating a powerful signature so that you get as many clicks as possible:

- Make sure that the signature invokes some kind of benefits

A signature that looks like this:

Click here to see my acne site

is a very poor signature that does not contain any kind of benefits.

On the other hand, a signature that looks like this:

Get your free report on how you can cure your acne in 3 simple steps

is much more powerful that is going to attract more clicks.

This may or may not seem obvious to you, but A LOT of people outside the IM niche do not know this very important concept.

- Make sure that the signature invokes some kind of curiosity

In addition to creating a benefit-filled signature, it’s also advisable to add some kind of curiosity ingredients to your signature.

For instance, our previous signature:

Get your free report on how you can cure your acne in 3 simple steps

could be better written like this:

Get the forbidden ‘cure your acne in 3 simple steps’ free report other acne experts don’t want you to know

- Capitalize the first letter of every word (if allowed by the forum)

Your original signature that looks like this:

Get the forbidden ‘cure your acne in 3 simple steps’ free report other acne experts don’t want you to know

would now look like this:

Get The Forbidden ‘Cure Your Acne In 3 Simple Steps’ Free Report Other Acne Experts Don’t Want You To Know

Why do you have to do this?

Because it stands out more so that more people notice your signature.

- Bold your signature (if allowed by the forum)

For the same simple reason as before, this will make your signature stands out more.

Step 3:

Now that you’ve created your forum signature, it’s time to start posting.

Remember that you’re in someone else’s house, so DO NOT blatantly try to sell your products and services.

The first post that you want to make is to open a new thread and introduce yourself to the other forum members. You can say things like where you’re from and your purpose in joining the forum.

Of course DO NOT say that your purpose is to sell your products and services. You could say that you are a former acne sufferer and you’re interested in all things related to acne.

It’s important that you do this so that others can at least know who you are and your background. This will serve well later on when you try to build a community in this forum.

Step 4:

After you’ve introduced yourself to the forum, it’s time to explore some of the forum threads and see if you can find some threads that you can contribute to.

Again, always remember not to sell blatantly.

The key is to join the discussion by providing great information and value that others will find useful. Contribute your expertise and try to help as many people as you possibly can.

One cool trick you can use is to contribute to threads that are still on the first page of the forum AND when you post your reply, your reply is still on the first page of that thread.

Confused?

Let me illustrate with screenshots…

This is what I mean when I say on the first page of the forum:

This is what I mean when I say when you post your reply, your reply is still on the first page of that thread:

The above screenshot shows 5 threads. If you were to reply to these threads, then your reply is going to show up on the first page of that thread, with the exception of the last thread (as can seen above that if you post your reply, it is going to show up on the 3^rd page).

Please note that I’m not saying that you shouldn’t post to threads that are more than 1 page long. I’m simply saying the chance that someone comes across your post (and your signature) is higher if you post to threads that is only 1 page long.

In order to make your forum marketing campaign a success, you must actively participate in the discussion. Consistency in helping others and providing value to them is key to effective forum marketing.

Once you’ve successfully build beneficial and trusting relationships with the people in the forum, selling to them becomes much easier.

A reminder for the last time: You’re in someone else’s house, so DO NOT spam!

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1 Simple Reason Why Nobody Wants To Buy Your Product

When it comes to the subject of creating products or services, many marketers make the huge mistake of creating the product or service before doing some due diligence first.

By due diligence I mean doing research to determine if the products or services they offer have some kind of demand or not.

This scenario – where marketers create products and services before gauging if there is any demand at all for their products – is most likely because they are simply too excited to get their feet off the ground and to get the ball rolling…

…not forgetting to mention also that most of these people are beginners who have just started to learn how to market online.

After all, every successful Internet marketer out there always advocates taking massive action!

If all they do is simply learning without taking any action, they’ll get screamed at. Now that they have taken the courageous first step to actually get the ball rolling, nobody wants to buy their products/services.

So these action-takers can’t totally be blamed can they?

Whilst the aspirations and desires to make a profit marketing products and services is great, one needs to take into account the demand for the kind of products or services being created.

It is simply useless to be creating a perfect, fantastic, super duper powerful product when nobody wants to use it.

So the first step you need to do when it comes to creating products or services to market (both online and offline) is to first determine if there is any demand for that product/service.

If there is no demand or if the demand is very, very little then you should not develop the product/service.

If there is substantial demand, then you can get started on getting your product or service created.

One effective way I’ve discovered over the past few years to gauge the demand for your product or service is to find out what problems people want to have solved. This means that these people not only have problems, but they want these problems to be solved.

The more desperate these problems the better for you as a product or service owner.

Why?

Because people will be more ready to shell out their money to fix desperate problems. For example, let’s say I’m about to go on a first date next week and I have these huge ugly pimples on my face. In this kind of dire situation, I’d happily shell out my hard earned money to get fast solutions so that I can have a neat and clean pimple-free face.

Now, one way to see what problems people are having is by visiting forums. After all, forums are places where people with the same interests (and problems) hang around!

Let’s take the above example where I’m in the VERY dire situation to get pimples cleared fast.

Go to Google and type “acne forum”. Look through the sites returned by Google.

As a rule of thumb, look through forums that have the following criteria:

1. Alexa Rank

Alexa rank is simply a measure of how much traffic a site is getting. It is not the most accurate thing in the world, but it gives us a picture of how well a particular site is doing in terms of traffic relative to other sites.

If you haven’t installed the Alexa toolbar on your Firefox browser yet, then my advice is to do it now. The toolbar is Free and it’s a great tool to add to your Internet marketing arsenal.

Go to Alexa

Click the “Get Sparky” button and follow the simple steps to install your Alexa toolbar.

When looking for forums, strive to find those with Alexa rank less than 1 million. The less the Alexa rank the better.

At the time of this writing, Yahoo has an Alexa rank of 1, Google 2, and YouTube 3. This means that Yahoo is the most visited site on the planet, Google the second most visited site, and YouTube the third most visited site.

2. How Many Members Are Registered At The Forum

The more registered members the better, because you can gain more insights to the different problems faced by these members.

This way, you can read through the posts to find potential big problems that your product could cater to meet the needs of these people who are desperately seeking solutions.

Strive to find at least 5000 registered members. The more registered members the better.

3. How Many Page Views Are There?

When you land on a forum homepage, typically it will have sub-forums. In our acne forum example, you could have sub-forums on different sub-topics.

For example, using Google I found this acne forum, which is further categorized into sub-forums:

You can see that there are sub-forums on “acne treatments”, “adult acne”, “acne scars”, etc.

Go into one of the sub-forums:

You can see that one of the posts has a VERY high page views (4,524) as seen above. This would be a great thread (post) to browse through to find potential problems these “acne people” are having.

Generally speaking, the more page views the better.

4. How Many Replies Are There?

The more replies to a specific thread (post) the better for you when doing research to discover problems faced by these people.

Why?

Because more replies mean that the topic being discussed is more popular than other topics.

When time is limited, strive to read those threads with more replies first. If time permits, then you can, of course, browse through other threads as well.

In this article, you’ve learned how to discover potential problems people have using the power of forum research. Once you have a rough idea about their problems, you can even post a thread in the forum asking if they would be interested in such and such a product or service, which of course is the product or service you will be offering to them in the near future.

In the next article, I’ll be covering how to market your product or service to these people, which is called effective forum marketing.

Stay tuned…

Be Specific Please…

Which do you think sounds better and more convincing?

“Lose 20 pounds in 10 days”

Or

“Lose a lot of weight in a short period of time”?

If you are like most people, of course the first statement sounds better and more convincing.

Why?

Well, it’s because the first statement uses specifics. Losing 20 pounds in 10 days is much more specific than simply saying “lose a lot of weight in a short period of time”.

In fact, the latter statement sounds very vague. How much is a lot of weight? What is considered a short period of time?

For someone, losing 20 pounds is a lot whereas to another person it may be very little.

For John, a short period of time is less than a week while Peter thinks that one day is a “short period of time”.

Do you see where I’m going with this? And do you know why practicing specifics are much better than not using specifics (of course this depends on the situation, but in the example above, it’s certainly a lot better to use specifics)?

It’s because when you are specific, it adds more credibility. The more specific you get, the more detailed the information will be. People trust you more when you are more specific.

Think about it for a second.

If you were an overweight person looking for ways to reduce your weight, and you were presented with the above two offers, which one would you buy trust more and eventually buy from?

Of course the first one, which is “Lose 20 pounds in 10 days”!

Generally speaking a person who is lying will find it more difficult to practice specifics, compared to someone who is practicing specifics based on true events that happened.

Don’t you agree?

So how can this benefit your business?

When constructing offers, be it sales letters or squeeze pages, it would be a lot better if you use specifics as opposed to simply providing general information which anyone can just come up on the top of their heads.

For sales letter, I’m pretty sure that if you were to add some specific information (especially numbers) to your marketing message, you can increase your sales percentage.

For squeeze page, the same principle applies. The more specific you get, the more credible it will be, and provided everything else stays the same, I’ll bet that your opt-in rate will increase.

When you are setting goals or targets, be specific as well. (By the way, the beginning of the year (which is now) is always a popular time to set new goals and targets for the year ahead). When your goals are specific, it will be easier to achieve.

For example, if your goal is to achieve a net profit of $5000/month from your business, it is going to be easier to achieve than if your goal is to simply “earn more money”.

Do you see the difference?

When you set a specific goal, your mind can visualize easier and hence work toward that goal much more efficiently. If you merely set a goal to “earn more money”, your brain will be confused as to what exactly constitutes “more money”.

Does earning $10 more per month constitutes as earning more money? It certainly is in English terms!