There are free ways to market your business on the internet and there are also paid marketing strategies. Paid strategies cost money, and free strategies cost time. If you are low on money, but have some free time, then forum marketing might be right for you.

Here are 5 keys to making money with forums.

1. Choose a Profitable Niche Market- Find a market where people are already spending money. You can do this by looking at the top selling products on sites like Amazon, ebay, and Clickbank.

If there is a category with several products on one of these sites, that means that people are making money in that niche.

2. Find a hot selling product in that niche- It is actually more profitable to find three to five hot selling products and then build an email list in that niche, because managing an email list can be done relatively inexspensively with an auto responder.

However, if you are flat broke, then you can start by sending all of your traffic to a sales page.

If you do not have a product to sell, then you can earn commissions by selling other people's products. This is called affiliate marketing.

You can find products to sell by signing up with the affiliate programs for Amazon, Commission Junction, and Clickbank.

Amazon and Commission Junction have physical products with lower commission rates.

Clickbank has digital products such as ebooks and videos. These type of products tend to have much higher affiliate commission rates.

3. Create a good signature tag- A good signature tag will make people want to click on the link in your signature.

Make sure your signature tag is relevant to your niche, and that it contains either your affiliate link or a link to your squeeze page.

I have found that asking an intriguing question tends to work well in signature tags.

Also, good affiliate programs will have a banner image that you can leave in your signature tag.

4. Find the top three to five forums in your niche. Not all forums let you leave signature tags, so be sure to chose ones that do.

There are two easy ways to find forums.

- Look in a forum directory like Big Boards.

- Do a Google search with your keyword followed by the singular or plural of the following words: forum, news group, and/or discussion board

5. Post consistently- Be sure to follow the forum rules when you post, and always include your signature tag.

The two best types of post to make are to ask a question, or to answer a question.

You can post 3-5 times daily or more depending on the amount of time you have available.

Do not get discouraged if you do not get results immediately, because although free marketing strategies do work, they usually tend to take longer to get results.

Consistency is the key to anything. Don't just post for a week or so and then stop. As you post daily, people in the forums will become familiar with you, and you will start to get more clicks and make more sales.

Much Success,

Author's Bio: 

Jeremiah Carstarphen,The Cartoon Coach

Get more FREE Marketing Training at http://trainingbyj.com