Forums or message boards are a great way to reach like minded people in the same area of business your in, a growing number of business owners use forums to promote their slaves, their businesses, products and services, forums provide individuals and business with a unique opportunity to get involved with a community, which with time and dedication builds you a reputation which can be smartly used to market what you have to offer.
Some mistakenly think that forum advertising is limited to posting your AD in a specified forum, members and readers are less inclined to click on a topic if they don't know who the writer is, and they are even less encouraged to process to a website that this Ad mentions if the writer has not been contributing in the community.
I've seen a number of visitors to a forum come and go, post their Ad, disappear for a week, to come back and post another Ad, thinking that they are doing this an advertising campaign with repeating the same thing to probably tens of other forums, readers are not stupid, they can see that this members doesn't contribute, and he's only participating the Ad related forums.
The best way to gain the trust and confidence of the community is to contribute and share useful information, and never try to recommend yourself or your business in your posts, a simple link in your sig. will get clicked way more if you provide readers with something useful.
I personally and through interaction with other forumers know this for a fact, people are willing to give their business to someone offering free help with no expectations for rewards, than someone else heavily promoting himself.
Opening topics with your Ads is also a good thing, but don't make it the only thing that you do on a forum, here are some tips for you to follow when opening topics in general and when you open an Ad.
1- Make sure your topics are in the correct place on the forum, most forums have specific sub forums to open Ad related topics, look for them.
2- Never ever spam the forum with your Ad or try to bend the rules, if they have a sticky topic in the Ad forum, read it, it usually contains important information, lots of topics get deleted simply because the writer didn't bother to read the rules.
3- Your 1st topic shouldn't be an AD! would you trust someone with a 2 post count that has only posted Ads on a forum ? I wouldn't, and I know that most readers wont, so your really only wasting your time, and the time of the members reading your topics, which is another reason why they will most likely quit reading any of your future topics, you should contribute on the forum your posting in, introduce yourself and write about what you do, most forums have an introduction forum, readers are more likely to trust someone with a good post count, that has good comments and views and that has expressed a good knowledge in the topics he has contributed in on the forum.
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