Every niche has many forums dedicated to its discussion. All that's needed now is to find the forums that get the lion's share of the traffic in your niche so you can put your plan into motion. This is a plan you can put into place fairly quickly, no matter what you've been led to believe in the past. With all good things, however, time and care are required in order to get a maximum ROI. Only you can decide the best route to follow for your business.
Pursuing a particular method of marketing on the Internet is something that you should understand to some degree before you do it. So if you try out forum marketing, you should have an idea of how it will be beneficial for you and your business, before you spend any time doing it. Networking with other businesses in your niche audience - that is what forum marketing is all about. It's actually more like "relationship marketing", opposed to networking in the traditional sense. So when you compare the two, relationship marketing is what it's all about, more so than networking and trying to make a business connection. Using a completely different approach to traditional marketing, forum marketing can actually help you build your brand name as well. The key is to offer "over the top" value for everything that you have, thus gaining exposure will benefit your brand name immensely. If you offer so much value that people won't forget, your reputation get more will grow leaps and bounds on the forum. Any time you enter a forum for the first time, there are some important things to look for. Looking around is essential for deciding on whether or not this forum is for you. You have to consider some things since you will be using the forums for your online marketing. 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. You can sometimes find that out by reading the forum rules. The absence of links, and signatures, at the bottoms of posts is a clear sign online marketing is not allowed. The vast majority of forums, even if they allow signatures, don't allow you to directly market to the community anyway. In essence, they are preventing their forum from looking like a giant billboard in the proverbial Internet sky.
Take a little time to watch and figure out who's considered important on the forums before you even think about starting to network. In general, there are a few people who carry a lot of sway on the boards. There is some influence to this based on the sheer number of forum members too. Forums with long histories and large memberships will have more influence bringers than smaller forums. It isn't always easy to guess, from the outside, who will have the most influence. It's usually easy to recognize the people who are 'leaders' on the forum as they are the ones others are trying to get the attention of. These are the people you want to work to build a relationship with.
You can think about forum marketing in a similar way as social marketing. And it's no surprise that forum marketing is a form of social marketing. Both are based on relationship marketing and you can reach your goals if you learn how proper relationship marketing works.