You can get more from forum marketing than what you probably think. Finding out about these benefits will help you to market your business better. You see, unless you've spent a lot of time in forums for business reasons, then it's really easy to overlook some things. It is so out there that it would have been easy to miss.
Remember that your goal is to be viewed as an expert in your niche. It's important to build a good reputation in the forum. If you fail to do either, you'll have less than optimal results. The first challenge, however, is being seen. What you want to avoid is spending a lot of time in any forum. This is only a small part of your overall 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.
A easy way you can try this out to determine if marketing is allowed is to look at the signatures. Find out if the signatures have links. This is what is done if forum marketing is okay. When you start to frequent plenty of forums, you will be able to determine what the members can do in terms of marketing. Also, you can determine what can be done just by looking at the other signatures. For Source instance, you can often see multiple links with graphics, etc. This will give you an indication that it's really a marketing friendly forum and you can proceed to join.
Figure out who has a lot of influence on the forums before you really dig into your own networking efforts. Most of the time there are a few people who could easily claim this role. The number of active members in a forum will have some influence on this too. The longer a forum has been around and the more members it has, the larger the pool of influence on that forum is likely to be. 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. Even though forum marketing works, do not expect immediate results. However, you could score a few quick sales if you find the right forum and product. Some forums will allow marketing, which will make you plenty of quick cash.