Forum marketing is one of the easiest and most productive methods online marketers have of promoting their businesses. This is something practically anyone can do for almost any niche. While there are some niches that are better represented with high-traffic forums, most will have something to offer for forum marketers.
Some business owners prefer to avoid forum marketing in pursuit of various 'high value' marketing options. The fact remains that Internet marketers can use this to meet many of their goals.
One page you should never go without reading is the TOS (terms of service) page. You'll need to know this information so that your participation can be long and bring you greater profit. The fastest way to get banned from a forum is by violating their terms of service. It doesn't matter to them if you've read the TOS or not. If you violate a TOS, then they assume you've read them and violated it anyway. This is how they feel about it-and they have reason to feel this way. That's why it's so important to read and understand the TOS before you get started.
A easy way to determine if marketing is allowed is to look at the signatures. Confirm whether or not the signatures have links in them. This is what happens if form marketing is allowed. After you have been to a couple of forums you will be able to ascertain the forum marketing rules. Also, you will know what you can do by studying the signatures of important link other members on the forum. For example, they might have links and graphics. This will let you see if marketing is welcomed on a particular forum.
Any time you join a forum, you have control over your own persona or how people view you. You can choose to be anyone you want in terms of personality. But do this with caution because you never know what will happen. If you tend to be loud, you can stop this and do not do it any longer. There may not be a lot of people who are strong like yourself. But the main thing is based upon how others view you. Depending on your niche, you may not want people to know how you really are. So, remember what you want to accomplish when dealing with all of this.
You can work a lot of forums and still only devote about five hours a week to the effort and, bring in a ton of profit from forum marketing. That's nothing when you're talking about high-value marketing activity. The key is to diversify as much as possible so that your business is somewhat insulated from the instability of marketing online.