Just like everything else in marketing, it is all about branding. Weather it be yourself or your business, branding is an important aspect of building your business. So, when you attempt to use forums to advertise yourself or your business, you need to brand yourself as an expert in your particular field.

You can achieve this by answering the questions posted in the forums in a professional and informative manner. It is also very important that your answers be useful and correct. This will sometimes require you to do a little research in order to answer effectively.

The smarter and more professional you sound in your answers the better recognition/branding you will receive. These two are directly proportional to one another and if your answers are incorrect, lazy or even sarcastic, your credibility will suffer.

Now it goes without saying that you need to participate in forums with subjects that you know a lot about. This also means that that the products or services you sell should be in a niche that you know a lot about as well.

In other words, if you are selling widgets then you will need to participate in widget related forums and present yourself as a widget expert by answering peoples questions about widgets accurately and professionally.

FIND YOUR NICHE

Notice above, that I mentioned "niche forums"... What this means that when you attempt to advertise and market on forums, you don't want do this on any old forum. You need to find forums that have subjects related to your products and services.

In other words, you wouldn't want to be involved in a computer hardware forum when your products are gardening type products. So, it is very important that the forums you use have the same theme as your product or service line; otherwise you will just be spinning your wheels and wasting time.

USE A SIGNATURE

If you have not already noticed, most forums allow you to setup a signature which will be displayed below each of your post. This is a great place to put a link back to the website you are promoting.

Most Forum owners allow HTML in the signature lines which is great because you can use your own keywords to describe your website.

HTML example:( replace { and } with less-than and greater-than signs )
{a href="your website url"}your ad{/a}

In the example above I have use a set of keywords to describe my website and product. This not only serves the purpose of advertising my website to other forum users, but it also helps with SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engines, like Google give higher points to text links that point to websites. They give even more points if these text links contain the same keyword phrases that are used in the websites META tags and content.

Now some forum owners do not allow HTML, but they will hyperlink your website URL. Then again some forum owners won't even do that.

Other forums allow "Forum Code" which is similar to HTML but uses a different syntax. See below for an example of this.

Forum Code:( replace { and } with [ and ] )
{URL=your website url}Your ad{/URL}

Now until recently signature tags have been very effective at getting forum users to click and follow your links, however, like banner advertisements people have slowly become conditioned to ignore them. People will still click on your link, but only if you have truly branded yourself as an expert, because people are drawn to experts and love to work with them and buy from them.

USE POST SCRIPTS

This is one of the lesser known techniques that so many people overlook or neglect to use. Post Scripts or P.S. work great in forums simply because no one uses them.

Like I said before, after something is used a lot people tend to learn to overlook it and ignore it. This is why post scripts are so powerful, if they are formatted correctly.

There are three basic types of Post Scripts. You can have a Blatant Ad, a Testimonial, or an Oh Yea.

1: The Blatant Ad
The blatant add is the most common format you will find and is the least effective of all four. An example of an add P.S. would be something like:

--P.S. If you want to learn more about marketing on Myspace check out blah blah...

Do you see how that wouldn't be too effective? Most people tend to skip over advertisements and anything that looks like an advertisement so I do not recommend using this type. But, if you do, make the ad very subtle.

2: The Testimonial
The testimonial is when you give a personal testimonial about a product or service. Now it's important that this one doesn't look like an advertisement and instead looks more like an honest testimonial which happens to have a link pointing to the website. An example of a testimonial P.S. would look something like this:

--P.S. I actually did very well with Myspace after reading this e-book I found. Check it out if you want!

Now do you see how this is a step up from a blatant plug of a website or product. The testimonial come across as genuine and shows no signs or pressuring the reader into clicking the link. This method causes a bit of curiosity which is one of the prime reasons people do things.

3: The Oh yea
The Oh yea type is when you write as if you forgot to mention something in your answer. An example of the Oh yea P.S would look something like this:

--P.S. Oh yea, I forgot to mention, if you want to get some more info about those methods check out blah blah...

As you can see this one is the most personable one and will generally pull the most click-throughs to your website. The main thing to remember with any of these methods is to be sure that the post script is directly related to your answer and the subject of the post.

CONCLUSION

Well that's it, you can now officially call yourself an expert on forum marketing. If you combine and use all of the techniques above you generate a lot of high quality traffic to your website, which of course translates into sales and clients.