Forum Planning
There are a two components to the planning stages to consider.
- Forum Authority – Activity
- Product Marketing + Promotional Offers
If you are new to the forum world, most all forums are public to view, private to post/reply. You will need to sign-up/create an account for each forum….its a tedious process but once done its not needed again. When approved, forum accounts allow you to setup a signature. It’s important you have one and here is a template you can use:
Company Name
—add your slogan here—
http://www.website-address-here.com
Shared Hosting | Cloud Hosting | Dedicated Servers | Managed Hosting (list your most popular services here)
Not all but most do require a minimum number of posts associated with your account (10-20 seems to be popular) in order for you to self promote within Hosting Offers sections. This requirement while designed to weed out spammers is a fantastic way to demonstrate your knowledge and authority in the industry.
Think of it this way, when you assist someone (not a client) with a problem its out there for everyone to see. This person and others in the community see how you respond, the knowledge you bring and when done correctly are left feeling thankful and impressed. If you can achieve this level of authority, others will see fit that YOU need to be their guy for hosting their business. It’s a good deed that doesn’t get paid, but if done correctly will show dividends down the road.
NOTE: As a marketer you may not be the person to tackle the tech questions, but I’m sure you have someone in your support department who can. When joining a forum, glance over the latest topics to see what areas you can add your two cents. Save all the links that are outside your knowledge but you know your support team can handle. It’s even a good idea to have tech support when its quite on tickets to jump on these boards and build activity (authority).
The second portion of the planning phase is mapping out what products to promote and what offers to assign. We recommend a weekly schedule where you map out 52 weeks of promotional offers. Consistency is key and one afternoon of planning will take care of the entire year of forum posts. Without a plan, you will allow excuses to creep in and more importantly look at post activity and decide its not worth it.
IMPORTANT: This is FREE so any exposure you can generate that is free and only takes minimal time to setup/perform is valuable. You will NOT see huge amounts of activity on these posts, most all will get zero replies however that does not mean its not effective. We have seen time and time again that by doing this Forum Profit System consistently that sales for clients continued to come in. Stop the process and sales decreased and/or stopped altogether. Little to no activity on forum posts does not correlate with poor performance.
Below is the Forum Promotional Planner spreadsheet to download. This will help create the roadmap to product spotlights and promotional offers. This will also keep track of all the coupon codes you create and links to special landing pages (should you decide to use these).
You will notice once you start the forum posting process that some forums are more popular than others. Active forums move through posts fast, your post from last week could be on page 2 or 3… which is why we want you to post weekly (stay current and on the first page). The forums that aren’t as active and your post from last week is still featured on the first page. Our rule here is; if the promotional offer is different from last week you can post again. If you decided last week’s offer was good and you want to do it again….but your post from last week is on the first page…don’t! It will be seen as spamming the board and while it may not get removed it does not look good.
Downloads
- Forum Planning - Product Promotions
Right Click the above link and select "Save Link As" to save to your computer.