Every niche has many forums dedicated to its discussion. The trick is in finding the right forum with the right amount of traffic to suit your Internet marketing needs. This is a plan you can put into place fairly quickly, no matter what you've been led to believe in the past. It takes time and some patience to extract the most value from forums. Only you can decide the best route to follow for your business.
Make your first step one that involves establishing a good reputation so that you'll be viewed as an authority or expert in your niche. If you want to enjoy the best possible results this is a necessity for you. But you can't really get noticed as an authority without first being seen. But you're not interested in having your entire day spent on forums. This, after all, is only one part of a much larger marketing strategy.
It will also annoy regular members if you come on strong and make a ton of posts in a matter of hours. Figure out when the most members are present and time your posts during those peak times. You can make half a dozen or so thoughtful posts answering questions or contributing something valuable. After arriving at a new forum, you need to surf around to check it out for a couple of reasons. You should look for some things before ever deciding to you can try this out join. This matters when you're doing this for marketing purposes. For instance, some forum owners and members despise online marketers. This is something that will probably not occur if the owner is not very fond of IMers like yourself. All you have to do is read the forum rules to understand what is permissible. More than likely, if there are not any links or signatures at the bottom of each post, then probably not. The vast majority of forums, even if they allow signatures, don't allow you to directly market to the community anyway. They are preventing a billboard effect from taking over their forum by not allowing ads to show up.
As a forum member, you can control the way that people see you. You can create the type of personality that you choose for others to experience. But use this with careful thinking because you never know what's in the future. If you are a really aggressive person, you can change this in the very beginning. There may not be a lot of people anonymous who are strong like yourself. However, you control how others will see you. Based upon your circumstances, you might want everyone to know who you are. So, remember what you want to accomplish when dealing with all of this.
It's really easy to make this work without spending much more than five hours a week for all your forum marketing efforts regardless of how many forums you're working with. That's nothing when you're talking about high-value marketing activity. But just be sure you diversify your marketing so you get all you can from it and help insulate your business from business and web turbulence.