I also want to mention that you do need some experience in your niche. I don’t believe in the fact that you can be considered an authority if you are clueless about what you are talking about. This is the same rule that applies to creating your own products and all those “nonsense products” that come out telling you that you can become a product creator if you don’t have any experience. You can sell PLR products if you want, but that’s about the only option you have if you want to start selling your own products as a complete newbie.
Anyways, i just want to stress that this training article is for people with sufficient knowledge on a certain topic to even be eligible to become an authority.
Building up some rep in high traffic forums
Now the first part of this method is building up a forum profile in a forum that already receives tons of traffic. For my example i’m going to use the Warriorforum, because it’s the biggest forum in my niche, and it’s perfect for explaining this strategy.So what you do first is create a profile, and start posting every single day. It would help if you’re a longtime member there already, but that’s not absolutely necessary. Also make sure to add a picture to your profile so people can see you are a real person. Everything you can do to increase your credibilty is important.
Some good advice i will give you do is to get at least 100 posts. That will make you a lot more credible when applying this method. So if you put in a couple of days of work, you could easily add a good amount of high quality posts in order to build up your initial rep and scale to become an authority.
Creating a informative post on the forum
Alright when your profile is ready and looks legit, it’s time to help out soe people by making a post that is meant to genuinly help people out. This means that the information needs to be top-notch.Here you can see an example of such a post on the Warriorforum in the Email Marketing Section:
As you can see this post has currently over 16K views in just over 3 months! That’s really amazing, and what’s even better, is that this post will be there permanently, so it could easily collect hundreds of thousands of views in due time. There are plenty of posts like this in the Warriorforum that get daily traffic.
Here you can check out the thread: A List Building Strategy That Works
So what are the main advantages of creating a thread like this? Well there are plenty so let me give an overview:
People get to know you on the forum
Now if you already have a good amount of posts and you post on a consistent basis (which you should as you have seen from my forum marketing case study), then this is not the main objective of this method.However if you’re fairly new then this is a great way to have people recognise you in the threads, which in return will build up your rep even faster.
Don’t be surprised to be contacted by a lot of people asking you about your thread and wanting to give you tips. If you’re experienced a little, you can easily redirect people to your blog or anywhere you like basically to get some laser targeted free traffic. Just make sure you put helping people first, and selling after. It’s a cliché but the more you give away, the more you’ll get in return. So genuinly help people out and sales will follow soon after.
Building your list
Now this is something you have to be careful about so it doesn’t seem as you are just pitching your signature link. Preferably you want to create a thread about a certain topic (for instance list building, setting up a funnel), and have a signature link about another topic (for instance traffic generation).As you can see these two topics are very different, but still very related too. If your thread has 16K views, how many clicks you think you’ll get on your signature link? How many free subscribers you’ll get on your list? And what if your thread gets 100K+ views over a longer period of time? I’m sure you see the huge potential here if you’re smart about it.
Build up authority before you launch your own WSO
Now you wouldn’t believe how important reputation is in order to make a lot of sales in the WSO section. You could have a hit product if you’re completely new to the forum, but the odds are stacked against you.So by creating a high quality thread like this, you’ll build up some instant authority on the forum. People will see that you know what you are talking about and that will instill trust in their mind in order to make sales.
So after you created your thread, i mentioned that you will be contacted by a lot of people asking questions. So what you can do is simply contact these people again and offer them a review copy of your new product. Since you have helped them out before chances are high that they won’t mind taking a minute to check out your product and giving an honest review.
Make direct sales
Now here’s a very cool part about this method. If you have created a thread that provides value (in the example how to build a funnel to make more sales), you will get questions from people who don’t know how to get started.Frank, the guy that posted this very succesful thread contacted me about a month ago because he saw that i was selling a done for you funnel in the Wso section. This funnel basically uses the same strategy as Frank explained in his thread. Since he got so much questions from people asking about tips, and even asking him to create a funnel like this for them, he was kinda fed up with it (he doesn’t have much time to create funnels for other people) and decided to simply redirect people to my Wso. So he added a reference to my Wso in his thread:
Now guess what? After Frank posted this reply in his thread, i made about 15 more sales from my WSO about this sales funnel.
Now as you see he mentions he doesn’t make a
dime as he choose not to make some bonus income, which is totally fine,
but i’m sure you see the possiblity here. If he wanted i’m pretty sure
he could charge people a lot of money to set up a complete funnel for
them! So think outside of the box and this is a great opportunity to
make some easy sales too.
Increase your conversions when building a list
Now here’s something i get asked a lot: “How can i increase my conversions when i send out broadcasts to my list?”See these days it’s not just a matter of building up a list, sending out some emails and hoping to make some sales. That’s something everybody is doing and it’s very likely your subscribers are getting numerous emails from other marketers every single day. So with this in mind, this is a great method to make a name for yourself, because most people that are on your list will be a member of the Warriorforum (or from any other forum in your niche for that matter). So when they see a high quality thread like this, the trust factor will go up instantly, and i will say it again, if you want to make a lot of money from your list, you need to build up trust and authority, so this will definately help.
But remember when i said you could add a signature with a link to an “appearingly unrelated topic?” Well this doesn’t mean you can’t promote related products in the backend right? Here’s what you can do:
- Create a 7-day training program related to the topic of your thread.
- Find some high converting offers that will be beneficial for people in their business.
- Add the follow-up sequence in your autoresponder and make some easy affiliate sales.
