Work at Home Business

The Forum site has a few different areas. You may or may not know these terms so I will quickly touch on them. The site itself is called a board. The board is broken down into sections. These sections should contain forums that should coincide with the section title. In each forum you will find threads to post on or you can start your own. These are the basic parts of a forum site.

I am writing this to expose you to my personal experience of promoting on free advertising forums. There are a few things I would like to touch on to explain the effectiveness of using this form of exposure.

First thing you should always do is read the rules. This will do two things; give you the proper information to interact on the site without causing any problems for yourself. Also it will give you information to make a decision to register or not.

The value of networking and relationship marketing is number one in promoting any program or business. My wife and I have been testing the value of posting in different sections for a number of months now. Our last test was directed at the power of the forum introduction area. Sheryl actually initiated and brought action to this on her own. She has posted primarily in introduction forums only for about a month and a half. I started with the introductions information because it has produced the greatest results for getting hits on her site and people interested and joining her in business. The introduction section alone is the most powerful part of the board. Keep in mind that introductions are to promote yourself not your program. And always say hi to as many people as you can, introduce yourself and network!

A similar portion of the board is the body. This is where there are forums to interact with others. Allot of boards have a lounge, general chat area, articles, games, or any number of informational and fun places to interact. These are places to find people that will take the time to interact with you & get to know you. Even if people are not posting in your thread most of the time you are getting exposure from people looking at your post. An example of this is the word games section on our board. When I just looked in our game section I noticed that the first game we started only has 23 posts on it but it was viewed over 563 times. This means at least 500 people went in and viewed the sig-lines of the people that posted in that game. This is a very powerful exposure tool, which produces great results. It's all about the exposure! You are still promoting yourself and your knowledge. Networking is great on the boards you can get involved with so many other things than your project, but you are still advertising with every post.

So far I have addressed the networking part of the board. Now let's talk about the advertising portion. This is not necessarily a great way to network and interact with others, but using the advertising section does have great value. I will get into how to advertise in another article. For now I will explain the value of the advertising section on a board. This is where you are exposing what you are promoting directly to the world. You should always advertising in specified sections only. Spamming may be detrimental to your networking, remember you have a sig-line and it does get noticed. By placing ad copy and links you are allowing the spiders to openly see your project. Posting on multiple boards over time builds your link popularity and pushes your links towards the top of the search engines.

Sheryl and I at one time spent a few months advertising extremely heavy. The results when we did a search of our program were fantastic. Almost 80% of the first three pages on Google we owned with our links. We had 9 out of ten spots on the first page and two of our links were above the company link. This is what actually got us interested in testing different techniques and theories on forum sites to be more successful.

This is the result of testing the effectiveness of posting on free advertising forums. Please don't expect the same extreme results, unless you are willing to go to extremes as we did. But do expect results and great ones at that. Some boards are more powerful than others, at different times. This is due to different techniques used behind the scenes. We do searches periodically to check on our projects. Every now and then we will find a link that had been posted 6 or 8 months ago on top of the searches. As long as your post is still on a thread somewhere it can be exposed at anytime. Forum advertising is a very powerful way to gain exposure, and is gaining popularity everyday.

May your posts allow you prosperity beyond your needs wants, or desires.
Brad West
Onomoney