It's time for another post from our guest blogger and serial entrepreneur, Jesse Lakes. Today you'll learn how Jesse utilized forums as the primary marketing method for launching his Ski Movie Music site. Lots of great learning and a solid intro on how contributing valuable forum content can help you grow your business. You might want to read Jesse's first post How to Launch an Online Business in a Day to get caught up.
"...The feedback from a few like-minded friends, on my proof of concept website, was that the idea was solid. It provided a service that was of value to people and although there were some other places to find ski movie soundtracks my site was unique enough to set itself apart. This was more then enough motivation to keep me plowing ahead.
The next week was spent tweaking the design and building content. It became apparent early on that my site needed to be easy to use and visually appealing. The best way to maintain that was to keep it simple. Nothing flashy, nothing too techy just simple design and plenty of white space.
As I continued to build these soundtrack listings I started to do a lot of online research. Although I rarely found a complete listing I was usually able to find the bits and pieces of the soundtrack and movie and was able to put it together. It turned out that most of the information was scattered all over a handful of ski-based forums.
After I had what I thought was a good critical mass I knew it was time to turn the project loose to the world. I had designed the site with the Search Engine Optimization for Dummies book in hand so I knew that internally I had a fairly solid, search engine friendly site. Now I just needed incoming links and for people to start using it.
Since I had been bouncing around in forums for the last week I had started to develop an understanding of the community behind a few of them. I choose Teton Gravity Research’s forum as the springboard for my projects introduction to the greater world.
Forums are the home of online communities. Getting community support behind an early stage project can be a huge push. However, when you are joining a forum for the purpose of using it’s community for marketing one of your projects you walk a fine line.
Basic Forum Marketing Rules
- You are interacting with people so respect is a huge thing.
- Before posting, spend a little time ‘lurking’. Look around, read posts, get a feel for how things are run.
- Never create a thread as your first post, reply to others and get involved in a couple conversations.
- Don’t just post random stuff in order to get your thread count higher, make sure you are offering valid advice or opinion you can stand behind.
- If you have a thread you want to start make sure it hasn’t already been discussed. Use the site search to double check.
- Make sure you become part of the community before you start pushing your product/service.
- If there are questions that you can answer that deal with your project, book marked them but wait to answer them until you launched your project.
- You do not, under any circumstance want to be called out as a spammer.
Once you feel like you have a good sense of what is going on its time to launch your project.
Learning From Forums
- Ask for feedback from the community on your site design, layout, and concept.
- Ask for help for building content.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale (tell their friends, put up links or in my case buy songs).
- Make sure you add a link, usually at the end of the post, and preview it to make sure it works before you post it. Some forums don’t allow you to go back to edit/delete.
- Listen to the feedback you are getting and make sure your open minded about it.
- Reply to the comments, questions and criticism to keep the conversation active.
More Forum Marketing Tips
- Don’t create a signature until you have truly become a member of the community, but make sure you do!
- Make sure you have a link as well as good keywords in your tag.
- If you can time your responses to ‘bump’ the thread back to the top of the forum you enjoy the limelight a little longer but straight up ‘bumping’ is frowned upon.
- When the conversation is over, let it die and move onto the next thing.
- Stay active in the forum. Answer questions when you can and throw in opinions when you think they matter, especially when it is anyway related to your website.
If you pull this off correctly you will walk away with hundreds, if not thousands of people being evangelists for your site. Each of those people are now mini promoters for you. You will have also spread your link wide across the forum and it’s only a matter of time before Google and the other search engines start tracking you down.
Here is my first post pushing Ski Movie Music.
Ironically here is the first posting of a site that wanted to compete. Notice any differences?
(Of his 20 posts, they were across only 4 threads and half of them were on is first thread pushing his site. He got called out for spamming from the very get go)
Those first posts opened a flood gate of traffic to the site as well as a ton of information. Competition, website design tweaks and more content for the site was all being laid out for me by the community. It was the beginning of the next chapter for Ski Movie Music .com
Lessons learned:
- What does your site do that no one else’s does? Is there value and is it unique?
- No matter how brilliant your idea is it can’t be hard to use or look horrible. Unfortunately those two things will turn away all but the most loyal and creative.
- Forums are a great way to spread the word about your project to like minded people, get some help and get some incoming links for your site.
Between random adventures Jesse Lakes spends a lot of time day dreaming about how he will never have to work again.
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