How to Use Forums To Attract More Business
Are you really interacting and engaging with potential customers online as much as you should be? And I don’t mean Twittering or updating your Facebook Fanpage.
As important as those strategies are to your overall marketing plan, more often than not business owners and entrepreneurs forget about a key area to interact with potential customers that’s as old as the internet: forums.
There’s gazillion of them on the internet. They were around long before blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and even Google came onto the scene. There are millions of people who use them and yet they’re rarely talked about in social media strategy sessions and most businesses rarely use them for marketing. Why? Most people don’t see the value. I’ll argue with some compelling stats that might change your mind.
Redflagdeals.com is a Canadian Bargain-Hunting Community and one of the worlds most popular destinations for tracking down deals and connecting with other bargain hunters across the world. The statistics paint a very rosy picture. The forums have a top 5000 Alexa rating which means the site is in the top 5000 trafficked websites on the entire internet. Not bad.
On May 26th I created a thread in the Small Business forum called Ask me anything about web design and online marketing & promotion. I did this so I could interact with other business owners and find out their web design and marketing problems by offering free advice. As it turned out the visitors love it and its become quite a popular thread. Since I started the first post the traffic to my blog has steadily increased and besides Twitter and Facebook its my top 3 source for traffic to my blog. The amount of requests for quotes and website evaluations has also increased. As of today’s post the thread has 3000+ views and averaging of 71 views per day.
Don’t underestimate this powerful tool for traffic and lead generation.
Try these 7 steps and give forum participation for a couple of weeks…. you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
How To Use Forums To Attract More Business
- Find a forum that’s applicable to your business (There’s bound to at least one related to your niche). The Forum Finder is a great place to browse and find your ideal forum.
- Register in the forum with your real name. You’d be surprised how a little bit of authenticity will go nowadays on the internet. Pseudonyms look less trust-worthy than real names.
- Fill out your profile with all the necessary details, including a short blurb about yourself and your business. Put up a picture. Don’t worry stalkers won’t start lurking outside your window the minute you put your picture up on the internet.
- Create a signature with a link to your business or blog.
- Start a thread. Choose a topic that’s “sticky”, meaning a topic that can be revisited over and over without appearing dated. The broader the better.
- Make yourself the expert by writing responding to questions or comments related to your thread, and respond to every each one. People will appreciate the time you put into offering your expertise. Sooner or later you’ll find people asking about your premium services.
- Be proactive. Send users private messages and ask them some questions about them and what they do, and what led them to your thread. I’ve had fantastic business relationships start this way. Make sure to return to the thread often to ensure it stays fresh.
A few extra tips how to really rock at establishing yourself and attracting more business…..
- Don’t act spammy. Telling people about how great your service is or blatantly leading them to your business will get you shunned from most forums and possibly banned altogether. People can sense when their being sold to vs. when someone is offering genuine help.
- Create value with thoughtful and insight comments and replies.
- In addition to leaving a signature signature to your blog, leave a compelling reason why someone should visit your blog. Instead of just leaving a link, include a sentence of what you do and and a call-to-action to “Click Here” if they would like to know more. Here’s an example:
- Don’t start more than one or two threads, and establish yourself as the authority in the thread. Others will inevitably answer other peoples comments and question, but you should be the overall ‘guru’ since you started the thread.
- Another reason for sticking to one thread: social proof. The more views you have, the more popular and relevant your thread will be. When people sort for most popular threads you’ll come out on top.
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Mike, I like this post. I will try your approach to submit to forums more often and we will see how much traffic we can generate. Thanks.
Thanks Feraz. People really forget about forums as an excellent source of traffic. It was really the first thing about the web that was actually social, and surprising amount of people still use them.
Glad you found it helpful. Thanks for stopping in!
Forums are highly overlooked as a way to market your site or business which I don’t understand why others don’t take advantage of it.
Here you have a place where people are highly passionate, talk endlessly about different niches and are ready to dig in even deeper.
To add to the post; I would say to go big! Try to create a highly resourceful post that becomes stickied. I’ve seen some stickie posts that have been on the forum for years – imagine the impact of that as it becomes an “essential” reading where members continually refer new members over to it.
Plus, that’s exactly that expert strategy. If you have a sticky post on the forum everyone will pick up on your name – authority!
Murlu recently posted..The Single Biggest Reason Why You’re Not Making Money With Your Blog
And not only that links created in forums to your site is great for linkbuilding because it comes from high authority sites. Great point about creating a highly resourceful post! Taking initiative and offering an answer to a problem can have a huge impact! Very very good idea.