So now you know why forums are a treasure trove of information and potential prospects. But where do you find them?
A basic search for the desired topic and the word forums, will often find you plenty of great forums. For instance, if you help independent artists create CDs for distribution, you might do a search for “poetry forums” or “indie forums”. I normally suggest that you start with the hobbyist groups – people spend fortunes on their hobbies and interests.
Sometimes the keyword you want might not yield the results you’re looking for – there may not be many “timeshare resale” forums, but there are dozens, maybe hundreds of travel forums.
With search engines and their related properties, here are some good places to start.
At Google, your best bet after doing a web search may be to take a look at Google Groups. If you’ve been around long enough to remember newsgroups, you’ll recognize these are the web version.
Be particularly careful to read the posting guidelines in full. Some groups do not encourage commercial posting, others wamt to see them only under certain, specific conditions – in your introduction to the group, or as signature links only.
Dmoz.org can also help you find forums on tons of topics. Here’s a link to the directory search for forums. Yahoo also has a whole section of their directory dedicated to chats and forums.
There are even more places where you can look for topical forums – here’s a short list.
Find forums and newsgroups at Rice University. They link to several convenient locations across the Net.
One type of forum search a lot of people overlook are remotely hosted forums like EZBoard and Delphi forums. For sites that don’t need professional hosting on their servers, there are many services that will host forums for them in the interest of serving ads. These are great places to find long-standing forum communities.
Always, always ALWAYS obey the guidelines if they exist, and use common sense if they don’t. Respectful use of other people’s forums to draw traffic is often welcomed as long as you are a useful, positive contributor to the community. These are not the places to air your dirty laundry or settle disputes.
Being rude or otherwise uncooperative is just shooting yourself in the foot and getting you bad publicity. If you somehow find yourself at odds with someone, resolving your dispute in privete is not just classy, it’s smart.
Even if you are indisputably in the right, it’s quite simply fooolish to display tactless behavior in public, even with a direct competitor.
Remember those lurkers – to them you look like a hot-head. Some people will only recall that they have a bad impression of you – they often forget why, or who won. Like it or not, people are judging the quality of your service or product on how you conduct yourself.
And if that spot is getting your link high ranking, and someone researching your company finds your nasty comment in a search, they will move on to the next vendor without giving it a second thought.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t express yourself the way you wish, or that an offhand comment or joke in context is sure to be taken the wrong way. Even if someone else is dim enough to maka a groudless attack against you in public, as long as you are honest and level-headed in your discourse, it won’t reflect badly on you – most people are smart enough to do complete research on you and weigh two bad comments against 10,000 positive references.
What I’m saying is that you don’t want to establish a pattern of being a difficult person to deal with or to be seen as unfair. So the rule of thumb is not to post anything on a forum that you wouldn’t want your potential customers to read.
If there’s one place where bad publicy is not good publicty it’s Online. And by definition, you never know who’s watching.
