A lot of online forums are starting to include commercial sections. These are sections where you can pay to advertise your business, product or service. It can be beneficial to pay to advertise in a Forum as this will give you a leg up on the non-paying forum members. But generally you need to take things into account before you decide to pay to advertise. You should always check closely the number of visitors to forum. After all, if the number of visitors is low, then chances are you’re not going to make a lot of money off your advert. Now it can still be appropriate to advertise on there if these visitors are of an extremely high quality that is they’re proven to convert to sales. Maybe because there’s a desperate need and the people are visiting who would be keen to pay for information to solve their problem with immediate effect. Always check the number of visitors quite carefully to see if it’s big enough to make advertising worthwhile.
Pricing is an important concern as well, as this can vary substantially between one forum and the next. You need to work out the value for money based upon the pricing. That is, “How visible will your advert be?” If you’re paying to have your posts right at the top of the Forums as the first thing that people see when they arrive, this could be a highly lucrative position if you can keep your posts there.
If you know your posts are going to be seen for a brief period of time in the hours, days – all depending on your niche, advertising may not be the best option. You need to weigh up the price versus what you’re going to get in return to see whether it’s worthwhile.
Traffic is a highly important consideration. You want to get visitors to your site, both to look at your sales page from your advert. It can often be useful be useful to test out an advert first of all and to see what kind of conversion you going to have in a particular forum. You maybe have to do this using your online profile to provide some information and find out how many people are going to directly visit your site. If you know you’re going to get a lot of visitors at a high conversion rate, then paying to advertise can be a good deal. But traffic should always be an important consideration when you’re deciding on paid advertising within a Forum.
Generally, it’s worth paying to advertise on an online discussion forum if this is going to appropriate and a good fit to your product or service you’re selling. But you need to make a careful decision so you don’t waste your money. Check out the number of visitors at the Forum and see if it’s sufficient for your needs. Work out the price and then the cost benefit ratio of this advertisement and see how well traffic converts. If it’s good traffic then you can have a very good deal with this online forum advertising.