Using Forums For Passive Market Leadership

Every market or interest group in the world has a forum somewhere online and forums are a brilliant place for you to get a feel for your market and, over time, forums provide you with a platform to practice Market Leadership. Generally, the people who are most passionate about your market are in the forums. The key for you is to be a participant, be engaged. In today's lesson, Ed shows you how to find forums related to your market and the best practice to follow when participating.

To start off the lesson, Ed shows you how to search for forums in Google. Simply use your market keyword phrase with the word 'forum' added to the search. This is a time when you can use a keyword phrase for the market and not your micro-niche phrase if it returns no decent results. In Ed's example his micro-niche phrase is kitesurfing boards, but he just uses the term kitesurfing to find forums related to kitesurfing in general.

When you first start looking through the forums that you find, take the time to look through the forum rules and FAQ files. This serves two purposes. If you decide to start posting on the forum you can make sure that you follow the rules or guidelines, and you can also find useful information to add to your Evernote notebook.

Ed also discusses at length what best practice is when posting to forums. Being overly commercial with your posting, trying to sell something, is no way to build any kind of relationship with a forum community. If you find forums that look promising, take the time to register and fill out some profile information before posting to it. Depending on the forum, and following the forum guidelines, you might also be able to put an anchor text URL back to your micro-niche blog in your signature or forum profile. With a little bit of effort you can slowly build your profile within the forum community.

When you are looking through the various boards on the forums, take note of any advertising you find, any outgoing links or resources and what seems to be the most active parts of the forum. You will find that some forums can be a wealth of information.

At this stage we are in a passive Market Leadership role. The main purpose of visiting the forums right now is for research. Don't post on them too much and don't get sucked in so that you find yourself spending too much time on the forums, as they can be addictive (just ask some of the veteran Challengers about this with our own forum).

Actions For The Day - 1. Go to Google and search for forums relating to your market. 2. Register and fill in your profiles on forums of value that you find, including an anchor text URL where possible. 3. Look through the forums for various elements like advertising, FAQ files, RSS feeds etc. 4. Take notes using Evernote whenever you find useful information on the forums.