You can get more from forum marketing than what you probably think. Finding out about these benefits will help you to market your business better. If you have overlooked forums as a way to market your business, then you might have missed out on a golden opportunity. It is so obvious that you may have overlooked them.
Marketing online can be difficult at times, especially if you have no idea about the method you are using, or even how to use it. You won't know the benefits of online forum marketing unless you understand its benefits beforehand. You will be interacting with people on the forums, some of which will have businesses that you actually can network with. This type of marketing is about building strong relationships with these people and businesses, which goes far beyond typical networking. The latter is the most important of the two, and it's what you'll use in most other forms of marketing. Using forums for business reasons entails a different approach in which you build your brand. The key is to offer "over the top" value for everything that you have, thus gaining exposure will benefit your brand name immensely. So when you do this, your form reputation will skyrocket - that's what offering value will do for you. Forum marketing has many rules, but one of the most important is to provide value to the community. This will provide valuable info to someone who really needs it. The reasons for why other forum members do not like you could be obvious. One good example is if you come across that you're a real know-it-all. But it just depends on how you present your knowledge in the forum. Sure, you might know what you are talking about, but you have to be cautious about your reputation. If people get bad vibes about you, then it will have a negative impact on your reputation. It will not matter how good you are if people do not like you.
If you really want to go all out with your networking efforts, then find out who has influence in the forum. Sometimes there is a group of people that could be at the 'top of the heap' on the forum. The number of active members in a forum will have some influence on this too. Forums that have a lot of members and a long history will have more people with influence. So it just depends on the particular more helpful hints forum, and with some forums unfortunately it can be a moderator who has this strong influence. It's usually easy to recognize the people who are 'leaders' on the forum as they are the ones others are trying to get the attention of. These are the people you want to get to know as quickly as possible on the forum.
It's easy to get attached to forums. Don't get so caught up in building relationships on these forums that you forget why you're doing it. Always remember that your time has value and choose wisely where you spend it. Your want the best possible return on investment for your time, after all.