Smart Forum Marketing vs Begging for Clicks

People come to the Warrior Forum and the like to learn about IM. Some come just to have one or two specific questions answered. This is fine, because often times their questions spark an interesting conversation or debate. That is the beauty of chat forums... you get lots of opinions from lots of different points of view.

What I can't stand to see are all of the so called "marketers" that answer these questions with, "Click on the link in my sig!" This is not an answer! It's not even worthy of being called a sales pitch! If anything, it has the opposite effect.

There are a lot of courses that teach about forum marketing. Replying to threads with the sole intention of begging people to click on your ads is not taught in any of these courses. If it is, then you were sold a bag of goods.

Forum marketing is not about begging for clicks. It is about proving your worthiness.

How do you prove your worthiness? You prove it by being a helpful forum member.

Some of the most successful Warriors are constantly answering questions that help newbies, as well as other experienced members. They stick to topics that they are knowledgeable in and avoid pretending to be knowledgeable in areas that they are not. A successful forum marketer knows his limits and boundaries.

Today, I counted over a dozen posts from people that responded to questions with "Click my link" or something along those lines. My advice to those people is to STOP DOING THAT! Don't you think that if you provided the OP with a good solid answer he might say, "Wow, this guy knows what he is talking about. I think I will check out what he is selling."

Begging for clicks does not increase your credibility. It does just the opposite.

Another big mistake in forum marketing is when a person is selling a product in their sig file that they know nothing about. I know that many people use PLR to create products, but have you ever thought to learn a little about the topic before pretending to be an expert on it? One of the funniest things in this biz is when I see a post asking for the best ways to generate traffic and looking at the poster's sig file to see "How I get a Zillion Visitors Every Day".