Forum marketing is a high ROI strategy because making a good impression in front of a savvy and influential audience can help your marketing message spread far and wide. Forum marketing is a great way to make your online business stand out from the crowd. Successful forum marketing means finding the right community for your business. Here are some tips to follow to effectively use forum marketing as part of your overall online strategy.

Tips to follow for effective Forum Marketing:

1. Find the right forum – Look for popular forums that cover your niche topic.  Ask your employees, customer and suppliers which online communities they are in. Search for forum hub sites such as Board Reader, Big Boards, and Board Tracker using niche-specific keywords. List 5 to 10 forums that will be worth your time, avoid forums that are hosted by the competitors and are overrun by spam. Use forums that have 10 to 15 new posts on a daily basis.
2. Create an account as soon as possible – Given the tremendous advantage of an early registration create your account as soon as possible and start posting valuable information and answering questions. 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.
3. Check the user agreement and posting guidelines – In the registration process you will be asked to agree to the forum’s user agreement and posting guidelines, read the rules carefully. Many forums have unique guidelines that you need to pay attention to and there are important issues that you need to look for such as:
   • Are users allowed to promote their own business?
   • Are users allowed to add signature links in their post?
   • What restrictions are in place for the new users?
   • What special privileges are there for veteran users?
4. Pick a good user name and avatar – Avatars are small pictures attached to all your posts. A good head shot of yourself, a cute picture of your kids or pets make the best avatars. Avoid using any pictures that might be considered offensive or controversial.
5. Create a compelling profile – Provide contact information so other users can get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more about your business. A good profile can help you establish credibility on the forum. Provide a solid description of your expertise and experience.
6. Introduce yourself – Many forums encourage new users to introduce themselves to the community by making an introductory post. 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 and learn from the community.
7. Make valuable contributions to the community – This is the key to successful forum marketing. Leave out your sales pitch in the beginning. 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.
8. Put your website’s address in your signature – Forum signatures are blocks of text or a graphic that is attached to the end of all your posts. Most people use signatures to display 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.
9. Create win-win 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.
10. Be careful how you outsource forum marketing – When you hire a marketing firm, make sure they understand that you will only accept ethical marketing practices that will enhance your image. Forum spamming may bring a little temporary traffic to your website, but in the long run these campaigns can seriously damage your reputation. For more information on how to use forum marketing effectively visit us at Google SEO Master.

Email marketing is an effective way to earn good money even when you are not in an office desk, or behind a big investment company. The only thing you need to remember, is to do everything right.

The best weapon in the open source email marketing industry is OpenEMM, the free, open-source version of Agnita’s commercial email marketing platform. It features a pack of CRM and list management tools, open tracking, event-driven email capabilities, click tracking, split testing and grouping, bounce processing, and a full featured editor. This will give you all the email marketing features you would need from a commercial pack that would cost you thousands of dollars, just for free.

However, with all its features, it’s not that easy to use. Administration and installation of an OpenEMM system is not for beginner users. It requires a solid working knowledge of SMTP, and the ability to install and administrate a full-featured Windows or Linux server with the Java platform available. This precludes most shared hosting, and may even be difficult with a managed dedicated server.

The best alternative for shared or managed hosting is PHPList. This package should work in any LAMP, WIMP or WAMP server configuration, including most shared hosting. In fact, many shared hosting providers have PHPList included in Fantastico or other application installers. In this case, PHPList can be a plug-and-play solution for newsletter or one-time offer list marketing.

The disadvantage however is that bounce processing is not sophisticated, but rather relies on message parsing, which is not as reliable as VERP bounce processing. Also, click and open tracking are not central to PHPList’s capabilities. Click and open tracking will require you to enable “experimental” features, and possibly apply source code patches. List segmentation and split testing are difficult, if not impossible, and not native to PHPList’s feature set. If you have some other mechanism to track clicks, and can live without opens tracking, PHPList is a solid, free solution.

Finally, if you have a WordPress blog, the simplest and most powerful solution might be a plugin away. Mailpress has an amazing array of features available, and as it’s a WordPress plugin can be used in combination with any WordPress blog. Of course, as a plugin, it offers a look and feel that WordPress users will be comfortable with, and tight integration with WordPress is possible, such as automatically sending blog posts via email.

To learn more about email marketing and how to get a grip of a good, solid, email marketing strategy, visit Google SEO Master and discover how to make great, decent money, even when jobless.