Forums are a good place to get noticed and to build relationships.

If you’re like most people, you probably “lurk” on a few forums; and possibly post on a few yourself, too.

In this short forum marketing article I talk about:

• How to get traffic from forums
• How to build your network on forums

It’s important to keep in mind …

… that all the usual web 2.0 marketing rules are still in force when it comes to forums.

For instance, just as you wouldn’t make shameless pitches on Facebook, you also shouldn’t do that on forums. Except when a forum has a section dedicated to promoting products, like, for example, the WSO section in the warrior forum.

How to get traffic from forums

Forums offer great potential when it comes to capturing visitors for your site.

The best way to do this is to post useful information; and then send readers to your site via a signature at the bottom of each post.

The more interesting your posts are, the more likely people are to check out your web site.

Thus you avoid high-pressure sales situations; and it can be one of the easiest ways to draw in new site visitors, who then might turn into subscribers and customers.

How to build your network on forums

You’ll find that your network builds naturally if you contribute a lot of useful posts to the forum. Instead of you trying to push yourself onto specific people, people start noticing you based on your contribution to the forum.

The  natural style of a forum thread encourages conversations, make good use of it. Respond to what other forum members are writing, and give answers to whatever they might respond to your posts.

Today’s action steps:

• If you’re not active on forums yet, your first step is to use google and find a few forums that relate to your niche.
• From any forums you find through search, or you already are a member of, you must now decide which ones are the best to spend your time with. Prefer the busier and bigger forums; they will give you more exposure and more contacts.

Rather than using your Twitter and Facebook accounts in total isolation from the rest of your internet business, think about using them as complements.

It’s likely that your web 2.0 accounts and your web sites and blog were created at different times.

So you probably did not have the big picture in the beginning, and you did never plan how to interconnect these different ‘points of contact’ for your prospects and customers.

It is a good idea, though, to do exactly this: connect all your sites and web 2.0 profiles in a useful way. Deepen the connection with your visitors by giving them more ways to stay in touch with you.

For example, it has become common on news channels to refer watchers to company and reporter Facebook profiles and Twitter profiles.

The reason for this is simple: by getting people to follow them through social networking sites, those news stations gain yet another point through which they can advertise and engage watchers.

You can cross promote too:

• If you do print advertising, you might consider using it to channel traffic to your social networking site profiles.
• You can add a badge for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever account to your web sites and blog.
• You can pull your blog’s newsfeed to your web 2.0 accounts.
• You can add links to your web sites and blogs to your web 2.0 accounts.

If you use this strategy, you can significantly boost the results from your marketing campaigns by sending visitors to your network of web 2.0 properties.

This will allow you to capture visitors by getting them to join your network, so that you can repeatedly pitch to them (rather than only once) in a low-pressure atmosphere.

One of the best uses of you LinkedIn.com profile is to generate organic search engine traffic for your business.

How can you do this?

By getting your customers to review you on LinkedIn.com.

With each positive review, your profile’s search engine ranking position will improve.

Getting better rankings for your profile will do two things for you:

1) it will send people looking for products or services in your niche to your linkedin.com profile; and

2) it will get more people to find your website through your Linkedin.com profile.

In either case, you have the potential to capture a great deal of extra traffic from individuals who are highly-targeted; and who are already interested in purchasing a product or service in your niche.

Next step for you:

Send an email (or phone your customers) and ask them to review your business on your LinkedIn.com profile.

While there’s lots of advice floating around, free and for purchase, I encourage you to use your own judgment over that of so called experts

It’s paradoxical – you might now be asking whether or not you should follow this tip, since I’m suggesting that you follow your own intuition, rather than MY advice.

But when it comes to building your brand online through web 2.0 marketing devices, it is important that you think about your own internet business, rather than the generic business that experts have in mind when they write guides like this.

While experts may give you some good general advice, in the end…

… you know your business better than anyone else.

… you know your customers better than anyone else.

… you know your industry better than anyone else.

If you find any advice that conflicts with the brand you want to create for your internet business, then you should go with your own ideas, rather than misapplying advice that may be useful for other business models—but not your own.

Everyone says you should be on Facebook on Twitter – but maybe there’s a better place where specifically your customers hang out.

Everyone says you should promote through web 2.0 this way or that way – but maybe you have OTHER ideas that fit your market and work well for you.

Don’t hesitate to try something different!

Don’t hesitate to do it your own way!

In Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #4: Create a Fan Page for Your Internet Business on Facebook I recommended you set up a fan page at facebook.

Now it’s time to actually use that business fan page.

Take some time today and Encourage Your Customers And Subcribers to Visit Your Facebook Fan Page and to become a fan.

There are two benefits of encouraging existing customers to become a fan of your internet business on Facebook.

The first benefit is that…

…. you can get additional exposure for your messages besides using the paid mediums (such as Facebook ads or any paid advertising).

The second major benefit is that you can market new products and services to existing customers without pitching to them directly.

They may overlook your email offers, or they may opt out at any time. But then there’s still a chance they stumble upon your Facebook fan page.

You can do this by simply creating a status update on Facebook.

Whenever they log into their account (even if they have no interest in conducting business), they’ll see your status update on their feed. If they find what you’re offering useful, they might just buy.

The best part of all of this is that you don’t have to make a high-pressure sales pitch, which might be awkward to do with existing clients. Instead, you can simply let them choose which pitches interest them; and which do not.

So, next step for you:

Find ways to tell your customers about your Facebook fan page, and, of course, email a link to your fan page to your subscriber list.

Many marketers believe that the only way to get traffic to a blog is to post frequently, ping, and optimize for natural search engine traffic.

In fact, one of the greatest ways to generate traffic via blogs doesn’t involve any of this.

The approach I’m talking about is simple: get direct traffic from other blogs by commenting frequently.

Of course, it’s important to understand that when I say “comment frequently,” I don’t mean spam other people’s blogs with irrelevant information.

Rather, I simply mean that you should look for relevant posts in niche blogs; and then make a useful, intelligent comment that links back to your blog.

If you spend a lot of time making useful comments, there’s a good chance you’ll re-direct some of the traffic that lands on the big name blogs to your own. You can then pass this traffic through your sales funnel.

You may also get the attention of other blog owners. But don’t overdo it, don’t start commenting the same blog again and again just to connect the owner. It might be tempting to mass comment on some guru’s blog, but they’ve seen it all before and they don’t like it.

So the overall guideline would be: is your comment a good contribution to the given blog post?

At first you might be inclined to use your web 2.0 properties only for information regarding your own business.

But as I’ve mentioned before, one of the best approaches you can take to web 2.0 marketing is to provide something truly useful for your readers.

For example, you could provide free information about topics related to your niche.

This free and useful information could be:

1. Links to important news related to your niche
2. Commentaries and opinions on important happenings within your niche
3. Links to sales and coupons (even if they’re not your own)
4. Links to useful resources and web sites.

If your readers can trust they will get useful information from you, they will come back to your pages (at Twitter, Facebook, and the like) again and again.

So, I suggest you make it a habit to quickly post whatever useful information you stumble upon during your day. It takes only 1 minute, or just a few seconds when tweeting, to get a tiny but useful post out there.

Once you use these strategies to build rapport with your visitors, you can then begin to reap the rewards by marketing your services and products to them.

No matter what social network you are using, it’s always a good idea to place a photo of yourself (or at least your internet business’s logo) where possible.

In general, people will be hesitant to interact with profiles that don’t have faces attached to them.

Of course, this is a personal decision and is ultimately up to you; however, if you plan to take your web 2.0 marketing efforts seriously, this is an important step to take.

This is especially true…
…if you want to brand yourself as a person, expert and authority.
…if you are the main person in your business getting in customer contact.
…if you are the official spokes person for your business.

There are actually 2 things you can do:
1) Get a nice photo (or if you don’t have one…get a nice haircut and them make a new photo) and post it to each of your web 2.0 profiles.
2) Go to Gravatar.com, register an account and upload your photo there too. This will put your photo on other people’s sites, for example wordpress blogs, whenever you leave a comment there. So, with just one photo submission you appear on many, many sites.

It’s probably 3 minutes of work per site – and it gives your profile a face for years to come and for thousands of visitors to see.

By now you should have your own business profile at Twitter and Facebook. Now it’s time to look at another big player in the web 2.0 world:

http://LinkedIn.com

It’s currently at #29 at Alexa’s rank of the world’s most important web sites.

I bet you didn’t know that! Being that high on the list, it certainly is an asset for your business.

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, you might be surprised to find out that they’ve already collected information about you; and have used it to construct a profile that might include some or all of the following information:

1)    where you went to college;

2)    what jobs you hold or have held in the past;

3)    what businesses you have owned or own; and

4)    miscellaneous personal and professional information about you.

If you want to control what that profile says; and to use it to network with other business owners and potential clients, it’s a good idea to start by creating a profile.

Once you do that, you have a lot of options in terms of promotion and networking; however, for now, simply worry about getting the ball rolling by creating a profile.

Hop right over to their site and sign up. It’s only 5 minutes, and you’ll own another piece of web 2.0 real estate.

http://LinkedIn.com

Youtube is one of the most trafficked web sites on the internet.

There are many ways in which you can use YouTube improperly; and get nothing out of it. In fact, that is what most internet businesses do when they try to make money off of YouTube or video content in general.

If you decide to use web 2.0 video sites, I suggest that you start by …

… creating a tutorial series. This could be something like 5 videos, each of which covers a topic in an area related to your business.

However, if you find a series to time consuming, just put up one video instead.

Don’t go for beauty, don’t go for perfection.

Get the ball rolling.

What do I mean by that?

Well, first of all, don’t make your plan too big. You don’t have to deliver 52 installments on your topic right away. Start with anything between 1 and 5 videos.

Second, don’t make the production process too complicated. When I created my first online videos, I used green screen technique for special effects. It was nice, but it took much more time to finish a video. Today I just skipped all the fancy stuff. I put up some good light, point the the cam to my face and start shooting the video.

It’s most important to make these videos USEFUL. After all, you want to position yourself as an expert. You want to show your web site visitors that you are the-go-to-expert in your niche. Get something out that delivers value.

It’s a good way to position yourself as expert in your business niche.

If the videos are well-made; and if you market them well to get the ball rolling, there’s a good chance you could see a viral effect, where others begin referring friends to your videos without any compensation for doing so.

It’s a web 2.0 marketing tip that requires a little more effort, but it’s well worth it if you integrate it with your overall web 2.0 marketing plan.
(See web 2.0 marketing tip #16)