Creating a Forum Master List

Before you do anything else with forum marketing, your first step should be to create a master list of forums. Once you have constructed this list, you can use it to determine how you should spend most of your time on forums.

One good place to start when constructing your list is http://www.big-boards.com. Here, you will find the most comprehensive list of forums, along with a rundown of relevant vital statistics.

As an example, you might be trying to generate traffic for a site that helps people to restore old cars. You would then navigate to the “cars” section of Big Boards: http://www.big-boards.com/kw/cars/.

Here, you will find a variety of different car forums: Honda Tech, Club RSX, NAISOC Forums, Bimmerforums, and more than 250 others. Creating a master list is simply a matter of checking out the vital statistics and determining which fit your criteria.

With this in mind, you may want to open up an Excel spreadsheet; and create a row in it for each candidate site. Record all of the related vital statistics, such as the number of posts, the number of members, and the degree of relevance (as judged by you).

In addition to this, you should make an attempt to roughly judge the traffic trends of the board. You can do this by clicking the graph icon next to it. Big Boards tracks and provides information about the number of posts over time, the number of members over time, the number of daily unique visitors over time, and dozens of other categories of traffic statistics. You should attempt to use this information to determine whether the forum is growing or dying (and then jot down notes on this in your Excel spreadsheet).

Once you have finished creating this Excel spreadsheet of forums, you should begin pruning it down to something more manageable. You can do this by visiting each forum individually; and attempting to capture the atmosphere. You might want to ask the following questions:

1.    Is it a hostile or a friendly forum? For instance, are questions usually answered or ridiculed?

2.    How quickly (if ever) can you add a signature that includes a link to your site?

3.    How does the forum deal with commercial sites? Do they strictly prohibit reference to them? Do they allow it if it is reasonable and not an attempt to blatantly market the site?

4.    Who typically posts on the forum? Experts, novices, buyers, or sellers? This is important to understand, since a gardening site for gardening equipment sellers will have a very different type of commercial value than a forum for gardening equipment consumers.

Finally, after asking these questions, narrow down your list to less than 10 forums. This is your “master list” of forums. You should bookmark each of these and check them regularly.