As many webmasters and
regular web-surfers would know, an online forum
community is a great place to meet large groups of
people online. Forums provide a means through
which visitors to a website can interact with one
another and exchange ideas or reviews of products
or just talk about anything under the sun. Acute
marketers and webmasters will already know that
these communities are often excellent places for
free advertising.
Word-of-mouth advertising can be used to refer
to advertising by which people pass on the
marketing message through communication between
people. A forum community provides just the
setting for word-of-mouth advertising to spread
due to its nature of discussion and community
structure. Any one member who joins the community
is entitled to post his/her thoughts by creating
new forum threads or to reply to others or counter
someone else’s arguments. Every post that is made
is an opportunity to spread some word-of-mouth
advertising. This is often done through forum
profiles and signatures. A signature is a small
description of the member. Most forum communities
have no qualms about members posting some
self-advertising messages in their signatures, as
long as the advert is not too obtrusive.
Therefore, forum members can make use of their
signatures to post links to their websites or
links to products that they are selling. By
participating actively in forum communities, one
can easily reach a large audience. Because
everyone on the forum who participates in the
discussion is reading the posts of all members in
the discussion as well as signatures, an
attractive link will arouse their interests and
incite them to click on the link to go to your
advertised site. Imagine the impact that this
would have in a forum community with thousands of
members and your signature appearing in thousands
of posts. The boundaries in this form of
word-of-mouth advertising is limitless as it
largely depends on how much you post and
participate in the discussions. The more you
participate engagingly, the more times your links
appear and the more chances people get to see and
interest them to view your site.
Of course, care must be taken to ensure that
you are following the proper etiquette as
specified by the forum community and that you do
not spam the forums. Spamming happens when someone
joins in every discussion and posts useless
comments that are not constructive. Spammers are
often penalized by being banned from the forum for
spamming their links in the forum.
