Marketing in forums can be a great place to promote your opportunity but if done incorrectly can ruin your reputation and credibility. These forums are meeting grounds for highly targeted prospects that are all there for the same reason with the same goals in mind. Imagine walking into a room with thousands of people ALL interested in the same thing!
Let’s list some of the benefits of using forums to market:
Highly targeted prospects
Making connections with goal oriented and professional people
You can learn while contributing to the community
Your posts remain over time and gradually increase exposure
People that already understand mlm are seeing your message
With forum marketing you will not get outrageous traffic but contributing to a forum and making a post takes at most a couple of minutes. If you were to spend 20 minutes per day posting to 5 or 6 forums and you were to receive 5, 10 or even 20 visitors this would be well worth it.
The great part about this is that those 10 or 15 visitors are HIGHLY TARGETED visitors. They understand network marketing, they don’t need convincing and they may even be already skilled so if they do happen to join your opportunity will already be ready to go!
The most important part of forum marketing is something called your “signature box”. This is just basically a short little message that goes at the bottom of every single one of your posts and is automatically inserted because you set it up in your profile. Please email me or do a search on google for my article on creating a KILLER signature.
Lets talk about the DO NOTs when it comes to forum marketing:
DO NOT post random posts just so people can see your signature box
ONLY post when you genuinely have something of value to add
DO NOT directly promote your opportunity in your posts
If you do these things people will know what you are doing and your credibility will be ruined and even if you do start contributing people will not take you seriously.
OK! So now for the good stuff! Let’s get into exactly what to do.
First of all, finding forums is pretty easy. Since we are in the network marketing industry we can simply go to google and type in “network marketing” + “forums”. Typing it in like this makes sure that the exact words come up. Don’t stop there though you can try other forums such as “MLM” + “Forums” and not only people in mlm forums are looking for opportunities! There are MANY other forums you can become a part of such as money forums or home business forums. You need to do your own testing and see what gives you the biggest response. But for now start with the network marketing and mlm forums. Also make sure there is activity In the forum. If there are only 100 members and nobody has posted for a month or two don’t even waste your time.
So how do you set up your signature box? Well let’s talk about “what” to put in your signature box. Exactly what you write in your signature box depends to a large degree what type of opportunity you are promoting. You need to address a concern that people have. For example let me just tell you an example of how I teach our team at Joblessjake to write our signature boxes. Our team addresses the concern of many newbie online marketers needing help because they are confused, overloaded with information, tired of joining program after program only to find they still don’t know what the heck to do! So when new team members get started on our team we give them step by step 1on1 mentoring to MAKE SURE they make money. They even get access to my cell phone, email and IM! So our team writes our signature boxes around this distinct advantage we offer. So what you must do is find something unique that you or your company or team offers and write a creative message in your signature box that makes people want to click on your link!