Forums: Your Gateway to Online Customers As a newbie marketer, whether online or offline, the first important thing to do is to know and understand your market.
Knowing your market well is a key to developing your product and your strategy for marketing your product.
You have to know their likes and dislikes, needs and wants, preferences, opinions, hobbies and every bit of information you can fish from them.
These seemingly trivial bits of information will help you get the trust of your customers.
You can use this information to make them comfortable talking to you and eventually trust you.
Trust you enough to believe in you and your products.
However, unlike offline or personal marketing, online marketing does not give you the liberty of getting to know your customers in person.
Hence you have limited chance or opportunity to know them better.
This is where Internet forums come in.
By participating in forums, you can get the information you need about your prospective customers.
And although some forums don't allow direct marketing of your product, participation can help you build rapport with other participants, who can later become your customers.
Participation in online forums can also improve your company's visibility and credibility.
Contrary to what most people think, there are also nice people on Internet.
People you can talk to about things you both like and even discuss and help each other about various problems-whether it is about hobbies, pets, house, mortgage, loans, or anything under the sun.
Joining in these discussions would give you, as an online marketer, a chance to interact, give your opinion, suggestion, or advice, and subtly promote yourself as a professional whom they can depend on.
Your goals in participating in forums are the following: Gaining participants', who are also prospective customers, trust; forming joint ventures; creating backlinks and; getting ideas for improvement of your products or getting entirely new ideas in creating new products or services.
Trust is very important in marketing.
People want value for their money.
So they are always skeptical, especially in buying things.
Of course, when there's money involved, everybody is skeptical.
And we all have a right to be.
It's not easy earning money so we should not be lax on spending it.
We wouldn't want wasting it on unintelligent purchase, which would regret buying in the end.
So people only buy things or brands they trust.
They only buy from people they trust, whom they believe empathize with and cares for them.
Hence, building trust is your first goal.
In order to gain people's trust, you should be prepared when posting your opinions and suggestions.
You should not post just for the sake of posting and joining the discussion.
You should act like the professional you are.
Be knowledgeable about the topic at hand.
Research your information and really learn it.
Be helpful and tactful at all times.
People trust those who show genuine concern.
And people would buy quicker from people they know and trust.
They would even recommend you to their other friends if they are satisfied with your products or service.
By recommendation, you would eventually get a lot of hit or traffic to your site.
Thus, further promoting your business.
Second, joint ventures.
You can meet a lot of successful business people in forums.
And these business people are in the forums usually because they are looking for good products that they can recommend to the countless members in their long marketing email lists.
If you could gain the trust of these people and form joint ventures with them, you would also gain the trust of their countless members.
How cool is that? Imagine how much traffic and business your site would get! Now, backlinks.
These are links to your internet business website.
Most forums allow this on participant's signatures.
So, the more you participate, the more links you post on forums, the better your chances are in getting visitors to website.
Once you have achieved these three goals, you would also have created publicity for yourself and your website.
You gain trust.
You gain friends, who would recommend you to their other friends.
And this creates a snowball effect because chances are these same people, who have come to trust you, would also talk about you and your products in other forums they join in.
And the cycle continues!