It's always a smart idea to have a plan of action for everything you do in business including forum marketing. You can reach many of your goals, but you need to know what they are and what forums can give you. Marketers who succeed do so because they do business in this fashion. First, they learn as much as possible about different marketing strategies. Then they try to figure how they can benefit from this knowledge.
It's always important to know why you're pursuing a particular marketing method. So if you try out forum marketing, you should have an idea of how it will be beneficial for you and your business, before you spend any time doing it. You will be interacting with people on the forums, some of which will have businesses that you actually can network with. It's actually more like "relationship marketing", opposed to networking in the traditional sense. As you'll see when you start posting on the forums, the latter (relationship building) is to key component of it all. Using a completely different approach to traditional marketing, forum marketing can actually help you build your brand name as well. The way you do that is by gaining exposure and offering value. If you offer so much value that people won't forget, your reputation will grow leaps and bounds on the forum. There are several things that you need to consider when you go to a forum your very advice first time. You need to think about why you want to join this forum, which can be determined by looking around. These things will matter since online marketing is what you are there for. If you want to market your products, the forum owners may not feel too kindly about your intentions. Should you join a forum where the owner cannot stand IMers, online marketing on that forum simply won't occur. Just go to the forum rules and they will tell you what you can and cannot do. By simply looking at the absence of signatures in forum posts, you will be able to discern if online marketing is possible. A good portion of forums frown upon direct marketing in forum posts to begin with. In essence, they are preventing their forum from looking like a giant billboard in the proverbial Internet sky.
If you really want to go all out with your networking efforts, then find out who has influence in the forum. You'll typically find there's really a handful of people who have this potential. There is some influence to this based on the sheer number of forum members too. There are some large marketing forums that have been around a while, and there are many people who have social influence. So it just depends on the particular forum, and with some forums unfortunately it can be a moderator who has this strong influence. Usually a senior moderator who's been there forever and many people basically try to win favor and acceptance. It's these members that broomfield search marketing you want to develop relationships with above all others.
So, see forum marketing as another type of marketing like social marketing. When you look at it, forum marketing is another way to do social marketing. Both are based on relationship marketing and you can reach your goals if you learn how proper relationship marketing works.