How To Maximize Your Forum Posts Results

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Posting to forums is a great way gaining exposure for whatever you want. Could be an affiliate landing page, squeeze page, sales page, whatever.

But let’s be honest. If you’re smart, I mean really smart, the ultimate goal of each and every of your forum posts is to get as many people to subscribe to your list!

Sending them to whatever page is sending them to an ad, having them sign up is running an online business.
Posting to forums is a very fast and powerful way to expand your list of subscribers in as little as 5 minutes. Here’s how you do that.

You can find forums about your niche very easily. Just Google the following:

+”your niche” +forum

or

+”your niche” +”discussion board”

Photo Credit: wili_hybrid

The strategies presented in here are usually acceptable on most forums, but you definitely want to know what’s permitted and what’s not, particularly when it comes to solicitations. Therefore, you must check the posting guidelines for each forum before you post.

Here are some quick and easy ways to get pre-qualified traffic flowing your way:

Ask for suggestions or advice.
Suppose you’ve written an article on your site entitled “15 Ways to Put the Romance Back in a Relationship.” You could make a post asking folks to check out the article and see if you missed anything. Or you can ask for additional points to add to your article. Of course you’ll have your opt in box at the end of the article with a compelling offer.

Let’s say you’ve written an article on losing weight quickly. You could post a message like this: “If you had to lose 5 pounds in 2 weeks for a wedding, how would you do it?”

It’s a great way to get both input and exposure for your article. You may also get other publishers who are interesting in your content for their ezines, leveraging that content even more.

Ask for a critique.
If you don’t mind getting honest feedback, many people will end up subscribing to your list. It’s a more indirect and acceptable way to ask people to check out your site without blatant advertising. Plus, the feedback they give you may help to make your squeeze page even more compelling. Ask them if it would persuade them to give it a try, assuming they were in your target market (of course you already know they are by the forum you selected). And if they say no, ask them why. You can get valuable information on what they want (and don’t want) this way.

There are two types of forums where you should ask for critiques: the niche forum itself and a marketing forum. You’ll likely get more sign-ups from the niche forum, and good advice to test out from the marketing forum (although you’ll get some opt ins there as well).

Ask your market what they want.
It’s one of the best ways to develop products and services they’ll buy and give you ideas for articles, autoresponder content, your blog posts, whatever you need.

The way you would use this technique to get them to subscribe is to post something like, “what’s your biggest question about building a web page?” Or “what’s the single most important thing you’d like to know about brewing your own beer?”

Don’t forget to ask if they’re willing to pay for solutions to their problems and have them give you an indication of how much they would be willing to pay. Powerful stuff!

Let them know you’ve already answered 7 questions (your 7 step mini-course loaded in your autoresponder), for example. Then they’ll be more likely to sign-up. Make sure you point out that you’ll add to your mini-course with the answers to the questions they’ve provided, and that they’ll get answers to the existing questions in your mini-course PLUS the new ones when they subscribe. Everybody wins!

Offer a checklist or video tutorial.
If someone asks how to research a niche market, give them a checklist of steps they can take. Or make a Camtasia tutorial video showing them how. Now that you’ve got them to your site, you’ll want to “make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

Offer a list of resources.
In addition to checklists, resource lists with website URLs make a great site for them to bookmark! Make sure you supply more than just links. Make it a huge info-page of information. A collection of resources, links to everything you have - articles, video, audio, your blog, other useful sites, tools, you name it.

Solve a problem or give some help.
If someone asks for help or asks a question, offer your experience and try to help them. But to maximize your odds of getting both the asker of the question and everyone else who reads the post to subscribe to your list, try to phrase your answer in one of the following two ways:

1. Give them tips, techniques, shortcuts, secrets, anything that offers both promise of exclusive information and fast results. A shortcut to success.
2. Whenever possible, supply them with specific results. Think about it. When you want to learn how to bowl a perfect game, you go to someone who has bowled a perfect game. When you want to know how to sing with a perfect pitch, you seek out someone who’s already mastered that skill. If you want to lose 10 pounds, it carries more weight (no pun intended) if the person guiding you has actually lost 10 pounds. Do you see where I’m going with this?

And by helping them, maybe -just maybe- they’ll click on the link in your signature to check out your website. If you direct them to a blog post or article you wrote to answer their question, they’ll be even more likely to investigate.

There you have it. Surefire ways to get the max out of your forum posts.

In a next post, I will reveal a sneaky but completely ethical way to virtually guarantee you get an onslaught of new subscribers, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, post your thoughts below.

Tags: building lists, forums, link building, posts