Make Money Online for Free: Forum Marketing

Forums are an effective way to make money and market your business online for several reasons. Unlike some other techniques, which revolve primarily around internet marketing, forums are available on just about any topic you can imagine.

The first reason you may want to consider using forums is what I just mentioned. You can find them on just about any topic. If there's not a forum for what you want to sell, then there's probably not a demand.

Next, you don't necessarily have to own your own website in order to market using forums. You can simply add your affiliate link to your signature file, if the forum allows it, and send traffic directly to it. The advantage of having a website though is that you can create a lead capture page on your website and then send traffic to it.

My recommendation is that you use a lead capture page. Building a list allows you to build a relationship with your visitors, recycle your traffic, and offer your visitors more than one product.

Now, if you want to market effectively on the forums, here's what you need to do:

1. Do a search in your favorite search engine for forums on your topic. The way to do this is to do a search for your search term and then the word forums. For example: gardening forums, internet marketing forums, potato gun forums.

2. Once you have found several forums on your topic, then check for certain criteria. These criteria include how many members are on the forum and how active the forum is. You may also want to consider searching for the forum on Alexa to see how well it does in the search rankings.

3. After you have done your research, select three to five of these sites to market on. Sign up for an account, create a profile, and read the forum rules. You don't want to get banned. Also, you want to create a forum signature. This will show up at the end of each post. If the site doesn't allow affiliate links, create a Hub Page, Squidoo lens, Blogger blog, or buy a domain and web hosting.

When creating your signature file, don't forget to find out what you are allowed to do. How long can your signature file be? How many links may you include? For an effective signature file that makes you money, you want to make sure that give away something for free to get visitors to join your list. This is for the reasons I listed above. Forums do come and go, so you'll always want to make sure that you market on more than your initial forums. Keep looking for places to go.

Although forums are somewhat "old school" when it comes to making money online, they still work, and they're very effective. Well worth your marketing time.

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Ad Number: 2080
Listing Date: June 30th, 2011
Expires: September 28th, 2012
Ad Views: 435
Owner: Jinger
Location: Atlanta, GA.
Member Since: March 26th, 2009