Forum marketing is a great way to make your online business stand out from the crowd. Forum users are generally net savvy and open to making online purchases. Many forum users are also respected experts and bloggers in the specific topics covered by the forum.

Forum marketing is a high ROI strategy because making a good impression in front of this savvy and influential audience can help your marketing message spread far and wide.

Follow this step-by-step guide to effectively use forum marketing as a part of your overall online marketing strategy and avoid some common mistakes.

1. Find the Right Forums for Your Market Niche

Not all forums are worth your time. Successful forum marketing means finding the right community for your business.

Look for popular forums that cover your niche topic. Start by asking your employees, suppliers, and customers which online communities they hang out in. Also, try doing a simple Google search for a keyword related to your niche plus “forum”. For example, if you in the Golf marketing you could search Google for “Golf forum”.

While you’ll probably come across hundreds, and possibly thousands of forums, you’ll want to narrow your list to 5-10 forums that will be worth your time using the following criteria:

• Look for forums that have at least 1,000 members and 10,000 posts.
• Make sure the forum gets at least ten to fifteen new posts on a daily basis.
• Ignore forums that are overrun by spam.
• Avoid forums hosted by your direct competitors.

2. Create Your Online Forum Account

Once you find the forums you’d like to consider for online marketing, you’ll want to setup your forum accounts right away.

Seniority is important in forum communities. Users with older registration dates are given more deference than newer users. Some forums even prevent new users from posting for the first few days after their initial registration. Given the tremendous advantage of early registration, you should create your forum accounts as soon as possible.

Effective forum marketing means that it is part of your long-term strategy. Think of forums as a permanent marketing channel for your business, instead of just one of many targets to blast your hot new advertising campaign.

Don’t let the idea of being new to an online forum discourage you. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to build relationships, establish credibility, and authority in the forum community.

3. Check the Community Guidelines Before Posting

During the registration process you will be asked to agree to the forum’s user agreement and posting guidelines. Read these rules and guidelines carefully. There is a lot of boilerplate legal language in these documents, so it is tempting to just skip over them and click yes without reading. However, many forums have unique guidelines that you need to pay attention to. Some of the most important issues to look for include:

• Are users allowed to place links in their posts?
• Are users allowed to promote their own businesses?
• Are users allowed to post commercial messages in their signatures?
• Are users allowed to contact other members for commercial purposes?
• What restrictions are placed on new users?
• What special privileges are given to veteran users?

Violating any of these rules can quickly get you on the wrong side of the community members and completely invalidate your efforts of building good relationships, trust, and credibility with the forum community.

4. Pick a Good Username and Avatar (or Photo)

Your username and avatar are the first things other users will notice about you. Pick a username that is easy to remember and pronounce. Using your real name might be appropriate, especially if your name is closely identified with your brand. Stay away from bizarre number combination or weird misspellings. Do not pick usernames that only have meaning for you but would otherwise be nonsensical to everyone else (e.g. your favorite grade school teacher’s initials).

Avatars are small pictures attached to all your posts. A good headshot of yourself or cute pictures of your kids or pets make the best avatars. Avoid using any pictures that might be considered offensive or controversial.

The best advice is to go with an actual picture of yourself as people prefer interacting and doing business with real people.

5. Create a Compelling User Profile

A good profile can help you establish credibility on the forum. Provide a solid description of your expertise and experience. Feel free to add in a couple of personal tidbits to humanize your profile. Information like your hometown, your pet’s name, or your favorite sports team are good ways to break the ice. Stay away from sharing potentially polarizing information such as political or religious affiliation.

Provide contact information so other users can get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more about your business. A lot of spammers and identity thieves search through forums for personal information. Therefore, you should only share information you wouldn’t mind being made public, such as a throwaway webmail address.

Most forums today will allow you to post links to your Facebook page, LinkedIn Profile, Twitter account along with other social media account such as Pinterest and Instagram– be sure to utilize these platforms and link to them!

6. Introduce Yourself to the Community

Many forums encourage new users to introduce themselves to the community by making an introductory post. This is usually done in threads especially designated for welcoming new members. These threads are usually called some variation of “Say Hi Here,” “How Did You Find Us,” or ” New Members Check In Here.”

Your introductory post should include a brief description of your expertise and an explanation of why you joined the forum. Let the other users know that your main goal is to contribute to and learn from the community. Do not make any marketing pitches in your first post. If you try to sell anything in your first post you will very likely get banned.

Remember it’s all about joining the community, being helpful, and adding value.

7. Spend Some Time “Lurking” on the Forum

Resist the urge to start posting right away. Forums are tight-knit communities that tend to shun and haze newcomers. Spend some time reading the forum to get a sense of the community’s special quirks and cultural norms. Figure out who the influential users are and note which topics are perennial favorites. Learning this information will help you fit in more quickly.

You’ll also get a lot of valuable insight into what the most common questions are in your market, what problems people have, and what are the most common types of solutions. Invaluable data!

8. Make Valuable and Useful Contributions to the Community

This is the key to successful forum marketing. Whenever anyone asks a question related to your products or services, dazzle them with incredibly useful answers. These situations are opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and to generate good will. Backup your advice with links to trusted sources, and respond to follow up questions quickly.

Leave out your sales pitch in the beginning. Any hint of bias in your initial posts will erase all your hard work. By keeping your answers objective, the entire community will start thinking of you as a trusted expert. They will soon start asking you for your recommendations. When you get direct inquiries for recommendations you may then safely mention your business without appearing biased.

9. Put Your Website URL in Your Signature File

Forum signatures are blocks of text or graphic that are attached to the end of all your posts. Most people use signatures to display their favorite quotes or links to their favorite websites. Some forums also allow users to use signatures to promote their own websites. If you are in a forum that allows self-promotional signatures, make sure you take full advantage of this opportunity and create a forum marketing signature that works.

Do not abuse this opportunity by putting flashy images or long advertising messages in your signature. An accurate, short description of your business and a link to your website is the best way to go.

Over time as you make more posts and answer more questions in the forum you’ll have more and more chances for people to see your signature find and drive traffic back to your website.

10. Avoid Controversy and Drama in Online Forums

Do not get drawn into heated arguments. It would be a shame to get banned just because you started arguing over emotional and controversial arguments involving politics, religion, and other heated topics. Keep these things in mind before posting or responding to posts in online forums:

• Constantly remind yourself that your mission here is to build good will for your business.
• Stay away from charged topics like politics or religion.
• Resist the urge to respond to criticism. If you have to answer, at least give yourself a couple of hours to cool off before responding.
• Use emoticons to indicate when you are being sarcastic.
• End discussions the moment you sense that it is getting contentious. Just say you agree to disagree and that you want to move on to other more pleasant topics.

11. Create Win-Win Marketing Campaigns

Once you have the respect of the users you can start more aggressive marketing campaigns. Focus on marketing techniques that provide a benefit for the forum community. For example, offer the forum members special discounts, free samples, or fun contests. Be sure to get the permission of the forum’s moderators before you start these campaigns.

A great method is to offer something for free as a way to drive traffic to build your email list.

12. Use Caution if Outsourcing Forum Marketing

Many marketing firms use bots or low-skilled foreign workers to spam forums. This is not the type of marketing you want. Forum spam may bring in a little temporary traffic to your website, but in the long run, these campaigns can seriously damage your online reputation. When you hire a social media marketing manager, make sure they understand that you will only accept ethical marketing practices that will enhance your image.

 

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic, your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing

Forum Marketing: Share your expertise with people asking questions about your industry.

In return, you’ll get a steady flow of traffic to your site. You will be the expert, after all. To ensure that you get traffic from all the time you spend answering questions, be sure to spend time on your forum marketing signature. Your signature tells other forum members who you are and how to read more about you. As you begin in forum marketing, you will want to watch out for (and completely avoid) these 8 Common Forum Marketing Mistakes.

2. Free Traffic Source: Blog Commenting

Blog Commenting: Very similar to forum marketing, blog commenting only differs in the platform it uses. Instead of being in a public forum, the commenting takes place within an individual blog. The linkback works very simply. In almost all blog platforms (Word Press, Blogger, etc) there is a field to enter your URL (your site address). If your comment catches a readers attention, they’ll click on the link and visit your site.

Be careful not to post comment spam. There is a need for caution when sharing links in the comment itself. Many bloggers don’t take well to this, as it comes across as a blatant attempt to siphon their traffic to your site. Unless the link you are posting directly answers a question, it’s best not to do it.

The other benefit to blog commenting, even if you don’t get many direct visitors, is that the search engines see the link and your site gets a small boost. If you post enough comments on enough unique blogs (different domains) then you’ll see a significant boost in traffic.

3. Free Traffic Source: Twitter Traffic

Twitter Traffic: When most users first sign up and start using Twitter it can be hard to see how it could ever bring significant traffic. Over time and with regularity Twitter quickly becomes a principal source of traffic. Many blogs use automation tools to feed links and past posts to their Twitter account. A favorite of mine is called Tweet Old Post. It takes past blog posts and tweets the title and URL to your account. Many blogs generate hundreds, even thousands of new visitors every month using this simple WordPress plug-in.

4. Free Traffic Source: eBay

eBay: The concept of using eBay as a sales platform is quite simple. Post a product (often at a loss or at cost) to generate attention and post your URL in the description as a source for more information about the product or the subject. Because of the size and traffic on eBay, you’ll reach thousands of new prospects. Other sales platforms to consider: CraigsList and Amazon.

5. Free Traffic Source: Contest Marketing

Contest Marketing: One of the fastest ways to generate non-purchased traffic is to have a contest. It is a great way to generate hundreds of inbound links, as bloggers love to share relevant contests with their readers, being the one to break the news. Many site owners have found it most effective to give away one very large prize, rather than numerous smaller ones. Everyone loves to dream about that huge trip to Europe, rather than the free song download. Big prizes create big results. In addition to the boost of traffic, be sure to require something of the visitors to enter. Consider requiring a simple newsletter subscription. That way you have their contact information should they win, and you also can keep them informed about new content as you publish.

An example of effective contest marketing was a Galapagos Trip for Two given away by Red Mangrove Galapagos Lodges. Contest period was open for a few months, more than 4500 people entered and the winner was drawn on video.

6. Free Traffic Source: Blog Design Adjustments

Blog Design Adjustments: Tweaking your site just a little can make huge differences to your traffic over time. Effective cross-linking, for example, will help Google to index your content, and help your human readers to see what other relevant content you have. These changes will also make for a better visitor experience and keep your readers on your site longer – which is never a bad thing.

7. Free Traffic Source: Content Aggregators

Content Aggregators: Getting your site (and posts) listed with a top content aggregator can send a flood of traffic. Consider Alltop.com. The benefit of an aggregator (a site that aggregates, or collects blog posts) is that they have a larger and broader readership than you do. By placing links to your content on these popular platforms, you can count on more traffic. But there’s a catch: they don’t accept just any site. While this is great for you when you are accepted, it can be hard to get accepted when your site is still new.

8. Free Traffic Source: Content Syndication

Content Syndication: This is most simply done via an RSS feed. This not only makes it easy for readers to follow your site but also notifies readers immediately upon publishing new content. It’s a great way to bring readers back to your site every time you publish a new piece of content. A popular tool to manage RSS feeds is FeedBurner (by Google).

9. Free Traffic Source: Write Great Content

Write Great Content: Nothing will build your traffic better than great content. Regardless of if it is blog posts, video or audio (or a combination of all three) you need to consistently produce great content. Great content encourages visitors to share your posts – via social media and links on their own sites and blogs. This social sharing by your readers has more weight than any purchased ad could ever carry.

10. Free Traffic Source: Build Your Blog Community

Build Your Blog Community: By taking the time to engage individual readers your site will benefit by increased traffic. An engaged community will happily share your content and refer new visitors to your site.

11. Free Traffic Source: Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging: This is a popular one. But how should you do it? First of all, a guest post should only be done on a popular site (more popular than yours). And it should be your best stuff. A mediocre post will bring mediocre results. Post a compelling piece that adds real value to the site you are contributing to. This will help you get another opportunity to post. And give a lot of thought to your bio line. A well-written bio will help motivate readers to click through to your site.

In addition to publishing great guest posts, it’s also important to accept guest posts. This helps widen your base of content and takes some writing pressure off of you. Be sure to publish a clear set of blogging guidelines – this will help reduce the number of low-quality posts that you will receive.

12. Free Traffic Source: Trackbacks

Trackbacks: WordPress (along with many other blogging platforms) has a great feature called trackbacks. What are Trackbacks? When you mention another blog on your site, their blog (if it is also on a supporting platform) will get a notification that they have been mentioned. It creates a linkback for readers to follow. It is an easy and effective way to both share great content and get contextual linkbacks.

13. Free Traffic Source: Video Syndication

Video Syndication: Creating video takes time but is worth the effort. Once the video is created, don’t stop with YouTube. Syndicate your video content with a service like OneLoad (owned by TubeMogul). OneLoad will take your video and share it across numerous platforms. Non-commercial use is free and the next level is $75 per month. Works flawlessly and exposes your message and content to millions more people.

14. Free Traffic Source: Video Tagging

Video Tagging: When you upload your videos, it’s important to take a few minutes to research the best tags for your post. One great way is to check out similar and popular video posts. You can mirror theirs and thus increase the odds of showing up as a related video on theirs. This simple approach can increase video views and site traffic many times over.

15. Free Traffic Source: Cool Site of the Day

Cool Site of the Day: This extremely popular site has the power to send a huge amount of traffic to your site, should it be chosen as the Cool Site of the Day. They accept submissions, so if you have a unique site it’s worth the time to submit. If you are accepted you will see thousands of new vistors in a matter of hours.

You may also consider: Video Responses, Video Embedding, Writing Tutorials and using bookmarking sites as effective ways to generate more traffic. Getting traffic is a critical part of starting your online business.

Imagine placing a Snapcode on the door or window of your store. A customer scans it, and an augmented reality (AR) image pops up on their smartphone. Lens Studio is a new desktop app from Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP) which lets you create Lenses to bring in the real world.

Snapchat Lens Studio Puts Augmented Reality in Reach

Lens Studio is a new way of creating Lenses so the Snapchat community can interact in the real world. The studio has been designed to simplify the creation of objects so they can be transposed using AR.

Snapchat has a young user base (mostly teens), but if your small business caters to this demographic, integrating AR is one way to interact with them. It is important to note more than $264 billion is spent annually for products bought by and for teens in the United States. The more ways you use to engage your customers, the better your chances of succeeding.

The new app makes AR more accessible. The company wrote on its blog, “With the launch of Lens Studio, we’re excited to make Lenses more accessible to creators, and experiences within Snapchat more personal and diverse.”

Lens Studio

With Lens Studio, Snapchat has opened its AR platform to the world. Creators and developers can use the application to place interactive 3D objects on images and videos with QR Snapcodes.

If you want to try Lens Studio, all you have to do is download the Mac or Windows version and start creating. The company says the app has been designed so even beginners in 2D animation or professional artists can start using it with easy to use guides and tools.

Once you create your image and QR Code, you can start promoting it as another marketing tool for your business. The one drawback is, it still has the 24 hour limit of Snapchat content.

What is Augmented Reality?

Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality (AR) brings superimposed computer-generated images with live direct or indirect views of physical real-world environments over your view of the real-world. So if you point your smartphone or another device in a particular location, it enhances your perception of reality.

The Pokémon craze that swept the world last year is an example of this. But it has infinitely more applications than gaming.

As a small business owner, using Lens Studio or another AR platform is one more way you can engage with your customers. And in most instances, these technologies are free. So have a go at it, and give your customers one more reason to walk through your door.

Social media is a tricky business. It seems so simple on the face of it and you may have launched your business profiles thinking that everything would take off if you only started posting. Sadly, that is rarely the case and many small business owners have hit their head against the wall trying to make headway, without any real results.

Don’t worry, it isn’t nearly as mysterious as you may be fearing. While social media has a tendency to change and adapt to new trends and features, not to mention shift with the way that users themselves choose to use it, there are some actionable social media tips that you can put into play right this second to begin seeing results.

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Actionable Social Media Tips

Hire a Social Media Manager

This may seem like trite advice but it is actually a really good strategy. Not to run your social media campaigns, but to teach you how to do it. Here is what you do: put out an ad for a temporary social media manager.

Set the contract for as long as your budget allows and specify that part of the job will be setting up a campaign and showing you how to continue it once the contract ends. Watch the steps carefully because that is how you will learn.

Use a Productive Social Media Scheduling Solution

Yes, you need to be there interacting with your social media community on a regular basis, but there’s other work to be done too! You cannot quit everything and just socialize (especially if you cannot afford to hire a social media manager just yet).

So what you do? Scheduling social media updates is the answer. You can even schedule social media updates 6 or 12 months ahead: Think about holidays, for example! You’ll be busy but you need your social media account to remain active, so use the slower seasons to schedule social media updates for the holidays.

There are a few solid social media scheduling solutions out there.

Get a More Comprehensive Dashboard

Once you are ready to launch your campaigns, you will want a solid dashboard where you can schedule posts, watch analytics, etc. There are plenty of options right now for a social media dashboard. I’m currently using Cyfe.

Set Smaller Goals and Build From There

When you are talking about a big business it is good to look at long term goals and then set milestones and plans to meet them. For small businesses that don’t have an entire marketing team and millions in the budget on hand, making smaller goals and focusing on those is a far better idea.

Set little milestones to work on and monitor your progress. For example, instead of saying, “I will have 10,000 followers by the end of the year on Instagram” try “I will grow by at least 100 followers per month.” If you overshoot it, hey… good for you.

Go To Where Your Customers Are

Guess what? The platform you chooses matters… a lot. Facebook, for example, is popular with people over the age of 30, particularly those over the age of 40. But if your target audience is under 25 you have next to no chance of reaching them there. They are almost entirely on Instagram and Snapchat.

The same goes for Twitter, which is becoming more a home of influencers than normal users. Where are the highest concentration of women? Pinterest. Where can you launch potentially viral content? Reddit. The list goes well beyond the basics and if you don’t know where your audience is hanging out then you won’t be able to reach them.

Quality Over Quantity (But Quantity, Too)

Striking a balance here can be really hard. On one hand, you want to be able to post often enough that your profile grows. But on the other, crappy content is still crappy content.

If you are just churning out useless posts like inspirational quotes or jokes, especially if you don’t have a fair amount of original content, you are nothing more than a glorified bot account. You may have noticed the best brand social media sites out there are the ones that manage to really engage with their customers. So post often, post consistently, but only post good stuff.

Don’t Get Too Bogged Down In Analytics

Analytics are helpful and most brands use them in order to measure their progress and results, while coming up with new campaigns using that data. They are great to have. But they are also not everything.

The truth is that unless you are a well versed social media mogul, you probably aren’t going to understand the majority of the figures analytics give you. The important ones are the more basic: growth over time and how it correlates with strategies in play at each peak. You may also be able to learn more about your demographic, such as when they are most active.

Learn the Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is simple: for every 100 percent of your content, 80 percent should be engagement, 20 percent should be promotional.

See? Easy. I won’t even bother going further into it.

Think Visually

Another no brainer, visual content is pretty much the only way to go. It won’t make up all of what you post, but it should make up most of it.

Posts with visual media are more likely to be shared, commented on, saved and reach viral status. All of these are things you want, so invest most of your time in visual forms of social content.

Get Involved In the Community

This is one of the best things you can do. You are a local small business. You have ties to the community where you operate. So start getting involved: go to festivals, reach out to local news, engage with people via geolocation, get involved in local charities.

Have some actionable social media tips for small businesses looking to get into the game? Let us know in the comments!

In the world of digital marketing, it’s hard to ignore the fact that visual content has become a powerful tool for brands in running successful marketing campaigns.

Considering that 65 percent of people are visual learners and articles with images get 94 percent more views compared to those without, it makes perfect sense to create compelling images in all areas of your digital marketing efforts.

However, hiring a professional graphic designer to give you high-quality images for your blog posts is expensive.

So how do other marketers edit their images without hiring a pro?

The solution is to DIY it!

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Social Media Image Maker Tools

Fortunately, there are some truly magical image editing tools designed for the technically challenged, and many of them are free to use or have low-cost plans.

Here are 5 Places to DIY your Images

Piktochart

Piktochart is one of the most popular online tools that allow you to create graphics, presentations and even infographics.

Their mantra, ‘Take your visual communication to the next level without hiring a graphic designer” is true to its nature, since they’ve helped a lot of marketers in create outstanding infographics over the years.

With Piktochart, all you need to do is to enter your data and choose a template and it automatically does the work for you.

MakeaMeme

MakeaMeme or MAM is a completely free online tool you can use to make your own meme. It includes a library of images you can simply slap on a caption and download after registering. However, the site does not specify if the images are under copyright, so using them may land you in legal trouble if you use it for your business, especially if your post goes viral. It is far safer to use the meme generator, where you can upload your own image or a stock photo for commercial use.

Here’s one using an image from Pixabay, an equally magical site for free stock photos, illustrations, and videos:

Other sites where you can find free and royalty-free images that require no attribution are MorgueFile and Public Domain Pictures.

Stencil

This is an online tool for easily creating images. It has its own library of thousands of royalty-free images that you can simply drag and drop to the work space, manipulate, filter, and a host of other stuff. The tool also provides social media icons, quotes, and templates.

You can’t simply copy and paste the image you’ve made, however. You have to save it on Stencil and download it, which takes a while. At any rate, it is easy to use and the free version allows you to create up to 10 images a month, so it’s all good.

PlaceIt

A blog is a useful marketing tool, more so if you can actively promote your brand through your visual content. A great tool for brand placement is PlaceIt, which lets you drag and drop your website’s URL or any landing page for a product in any of the stock photos or videos it has in its library. Here’s a sample using an image mockup:

It is free to use if you only need a small image (400×300 px) like the one above, but if you want high-res images, you have to pay per piece (from $8 up). You can also get 9 images a month for $29 or 31 images for $99.

You can also make demo videos, but there is no free version. You either pay per video ($29 or so) or pay $199 a month for unlimited videos and nine images.

Canva

Canva is a nifty image-editing tool, which makes it easy to make professional-looking graphics without having any graphic design chops.

You can choose from pre-set templates, or create your own. Aside from photos, you can also create infographics. All you have to do is choose among the many design options and start playing! Some photos and layouts carry a small price tag, but there are many of free ones as well. They have over 1 million pre-existing images and graphics to choose from.

And there you have it, the 5 places to DIY your images!

While these tools don’t really replace a good graphic designer, it’s nice to consider that there are amazing alternatives to help you kickstart your visual content strategy. Play around with these tools and decide which one best suits you image creation needs.

Do you have other image editing tools that you love? Let us know by leaving a comment!