3 Tips For Promoting Your Business in Forums

Participating in online forums where your potential customers gather is a great way to promote your business and generate a lot of traffic for your website.  In order to be successful, though, keep these three tips in mind.

1.  Sell relationships, not products.

Promoting your business in a forum is all about establishing yourself as an industry expert with a lot of valuable knowledge to share.  Don’t expect gimmicky sales tactics to work in forums.  The fastest way you can turn people against you in a forum is to post blatant product advertisements.  People participate in forums to connect with like-minded people and share relevant information, not to be sold something.

Your best bet in promoting in forums is to always look for opportunities to respond to participants’ questions with the exact information they are looking for.  This way, you will gain the respect of the community and start to establish yourself as a credible expert.

You need to sit back and listen, and wait for good opportunities to share your expert knowledge.  Be professional in your approach and post on a consistent basis, and you will begin to develop a strong relationship with that community.  This way, when you finally do mention your product or service casually as the answer to someone’s problem or refer a reader to your website for more information, the community will take you seriously, rather than being offended or angry.

2.  Attach a signature file to all of your posts.

Your electronic signature (“sig file”) is a three to six line footer that you should attach to the bottom of your emails and forum postings.  Of course, forums typically frown on obvious advertisements, but adding a sig file to posts that contain relevant, quality information is considered acceptable.  Your sig file should include your name, email address, phone number, URL, and a link to an informative article or newsletter subscription offer.

3.  Learn your Netiquette.

Different forums have different ideas of what is acceptable and what isn’t.  What you post and how you go about promoting your business in one forum might not work so well in another.  Here are some general rules you should abide by when posting in forums:

•    Avoid profanity.  This might be acceptable in some forums, but no matter what it isn’t professional and you can offend potential customers, so it’s best to just avoid using profanity in all situations.
•    Don’t post in capital letters.  Capital letters are considered YELLING and will offend and annoy your readers.
•    Ignore flaming.  Flames are nasty messages and emails that people may respond to you with.  It’s best to just ignore them and not respond back in kind.
•    Stay on topic.  You will annoy readers if you jump in with random comments or questions that aren’t relevant to the conversation.
•    Always be respectful of other members.  You will encounter all sorts of people in forums, some with very different backgrounds and opinions than your own.  Respect everyone’s right to their own point of view.
•    Don’t act like you’re better than anyone else.  If you can contribute to a discussion, make sure you do so in a way that doesn’t make you look arrogant.
•    Never spam!  Don’t post the same thing on hundreds of different forums.  This is a waste of your valuable time and can also get you into a lot of trouble.

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