Forum marketing can be a very effective (and free) way to generate leads for your business. However, there are several things to keep in mind.

As with any free marketing technique, the compromise is you are investing your time rather than your money, so be sure to follow these 8 suggestions so you can be sure you are spending that time wisely and effectively!

8 Important Tips On Forum Marketing

1. Nobody cares about your business. Let me repeat that. Nobody cares about your business. The last thing you want to do is join a forum and then begin pitching your opportunity. Instead, join the conversation and share some knowledge when appropriate.

The purpose of joining the forum is to meet other people, to build relationships and share information to help each other out. Over time, as you provide valuable advice and knowledge to the discussions you take part in, people will begin to recognize you as a leader.

2. All links belong in your signature. It doesn’t matter if it’s for an affiliate offer or your primary opportunity, links belong in your signature. That’s why it’s there in the first place!

Provide value and add to the conversation in your forum posts. Become a leader and people will become interested in you, which is when they will look to your signature to learn more about you.

3. Do not put links to generic company websites/capture pages in your signature. You’ve taken the time to build relationships with the members of the forum and provided them with value. The last thing they want is to land on a generic website when they click on the link in your signature.

Be a leader. Leaders have their own branded websites. Send them where you can build a stronger relationship with them by offering them more value such as a blog, for example.

Most forums have room to put a couple of links, so one can definitely be to your own personally branded website/capture page. For example, if you are involved with a generic lead generation system like MyLeadSystemPro, which can help other network marketers build their business…that would be a great place to send them!

4. Don’t be a know-it-all. It’s important to be confident and demonstrate leadership, but be respectful of other people and don’t act like you know absolutely everything, because nobody likes that!!

5. Don’t be afraid to join a forum on a topic other than marketing. For example, if you’re really into golf, it’s okay to join a golf forum and use your signature to say something like “Earning money online yet? I can show you how.”

6. Be consistent. Don’t go joining ten different forums all at once because that won’t accomplish anything. It’s much more effective to choose 1-3, depending on how much time you have to devote to your marketing. You’re better off being more involved on fewer forums than less involved on more forums.

Once you join, get involved. Don’t just sit back and watch the conversation! Expect to devote 3-6 days a week, especially in the beginning. Be careful though, and set a certain amount of time that you can afford to spend on each forum so time doesn’t just slip away!!

7. Be patient. Don’t expect to join a couple of forums one week and have leads pouring in the next week. Forum marketing can be very effective, but you must be patient. It takes time, but if you stick with it, it can be a great marketing technique. Remember, with marketing you are either spending time or money and in this case, it’s definitely time.

8. Join active forums that get a good amount of traffic. Use Alexa.com to help you with determining some active forums to join. Here are three examples of great forums for the network marketing niche:

RichDad.com
WarriorForum.com
BetterNetworker.com

Well, I guess that just about wraps it up! As with any other marketing technique, stick with it and be consistent. It won’t happen overnight, but forum marketing can be a great place to get leads for your business. It can also be a good place to learn some new things, so don’t forget to do that while you’re there!

P.S. Want more tips like this sent directly to your inbox? Sign up over to the right side of this page and you will not only get updates each week, but you will also get access to our exclusive Master Marketing Blueprint!

I spent a few years as a full time bartender at a restaurant and enjoyed the job at the time. I look back now on my time there and reflect on the similarities between being a bartender and now being a network marketer.

When I first started bartending, I never regularly had a full bar of patrons. I waited on people as they came in the door and decided to sit at the bar, because they wanted to sit at the bar and not necessarily because I was bartending.

Over time I developed my skills as a bartender and more importantly, I got to know my guests on a more personal level. I began developing relationships with them. Soon they weren’t necessarily coming to our restaurant because our beer tasted any different than anywhere else, but rather because they wanted to go somewhere where the bartender knew them and could anticipate their needs.

As the years went by, I began to make much more money because of the “regulars” I enjoyed waiting on at my bar. Many of them had their beers waiting on the bar as they walked through the front door and they appreciated that, they saw a value in it.

There was one particular group of “regulars” that came in on Tuesday nights, every week, and I enjoyed waiting on them. After I left they went back for a couple of weeks, but then decided not to continue going there. They now go to the bar across the street. I know this because, to this day, and I left over 5 years ago, I still occassionally run into a couple of them. They still go out on Tuesday nights and they still go to the competition across the street…and they still invite me to meet them over there for a drink

I don’t say all of this to imply that I think I was such a wonderful bartender. My bartending skills are certainly not the point of this post.

I say this because I am trying to demonstrate the simplicity of attraction marketing. Brand yourself and provide value to your target market and you will be successful, regardless of what you are selling.

Remember, there are thousands of distributors in your network marketing company and you are all offering the same products/business opportunity. The only difference in what you are selling is YOU. You must become so valuable to your target market that they will want to join YOU, not your competition.

Give them a reason to join your team. Provide them value and they will look to you as a leader. Anticipate their needs and they will appreciate that. Make yourself so “magnetic” that they will look nowhere else but to you when they are ready to start their own business!

Attraction marketing is not flashy, it’s simple, but sometimes it’s the simple things that we all tend to overcomplicate in life

To learn more about attraction marketing and how you can implement it into your business, click here to watch a free video bootcamp!

So let’s say for sake of argument that you already know how to set up your own website or blog. That’s great, but do you know how to optimize it so the search engines will find it?

That’s the real key because you can have the best information out there, but if nobody can find it, it doesn’t really do you any good right?

It would be like having a 5 star gourmet restaurant in the middle of nowhere, on a deserted road, that nobody even knows about…what a waste!

Ok, so now that we’ve established that you need to optimize your blog or website, the real question is how? How do you accomplish this? What do you need to do? Would you be willing to learn the strategies necessary?

After all, free organic traffic from Google and the other search engines sounds pretty good, right? Oh, and if you know the right tactics behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then this is free targeted traffic…even better.

“Where can you learn these SEO strategies?”

Well, we are going to be teaching some of these strategies to you right here on this website, but we’re not going to be covering all of them and it’s not because we don’t want to. It’s because our friends Raymond Fong and Ferny Ceballos provide arguably the best SEO training anywhere.

They teach network marketers how to optimize their websites and blogs to rank for their targeted keywords and they teach you how to get free traffic all day long. If you have not visited their website, you are missing out on some really top notch coaching that will definitely help you grow your business if you implement what they teach.

You’ll be amazed at the simple things you can do to improve your rankings on the search engines and you will be wondering why you weren’t doing them sooner. If you really want to take your business to the next level, we highly recommend heading over to SEONetworker.com.

You can thank us later

We hear this question all the time from people asking us, to seeing it posted on forums, etc.

The bottom line is they all do…well, almost all of them

What it really comes down to is not the method itself, but rather the marketer who is using it. It’s the same thing with all the “fad” diets, (which by the way I’m personally not an advocate of these). If you ask one person, one diet works and if you ask another person about the same diet, it doesn’t work.

This is because we are all different and we must understand our strengths and weaknesses.

For example, if you are super camera shy, but are a really great writer – would you focus your marketing efforts more on video marketing? No, probably not…you would probably benefit more from say article marketing or blogging for example.

It is best to focus on your strengths and lead with them, rather than trying to attack the areas of opportunity you may have! Don’t get me wrong, over time you will acquire the skill sets to be proficient in multiple methods, but do what you are most comfortable with to start.

Once you have mastered a marketing method, implemented it, and see results, move on to the next method and repeat. You will slowly develop skill sets in areas you were once uncomfortable in and this is good-it is important to move out of your comfort zone, it is how we grow as people and as marketers.

Once you’ve taken steps to add new marketing methods to your arsenal, you will be amazed at the results you will get. As you learn new methods, continue to implement, but don’t forget about continuing with the methods you have already learned.

Over time, you will be able to use your tracking information to decide which marketing strategies are yielding you the best results. Ones that aren’t yielding much if any results and are costing you time and money, you should pull way back on and consider stopping if they are not profitable. The ones that are working and are profitable, you should consider “ramping up” your efforts. Do more of what you are already doing!

The bottom line here is to do something and track your efforts! Find a method that you are comfortable with, master it and then move on to the next one. If you are using a marketing strategy that you just can’t “get behind”, then move on to something else and maybe revisit it at another time.

Don’t get too hung up on something that isn’t working and don’t spend all day bouncing between 20 different methods…well, at least not until you master those 20

If you are looking for a marketing system/education platform to help teach you effective marketing strategies to market your network marketing business, then click here for a glimpse into that system.