As many webmasters and regular web-surfers would know, an online forum community is a great place to meet large groups of people online. Forums provide a means through which visitors to a website can interact with one another and exchange ideas or reviews of products or just talk about anything under the sun. Acute marketers and webmasters will already know that these communities are often excellent places for free advertising.

Word-of-mouth advertising can be used to refer to advertising by which people pass on the marketing message through communication between people. A forum community provides just the setting for word-of-mouth advertising to spread due to its nature of discussion and community structure. Any one member who joins the community is entitled to post his/her thoughts by creating new forum threads or to reply to others or counter someone else’s arguments. Every post that is made is an opportunity to spread some word-of-mouth advertising. This is often done through forum profiles and signatures. A signature is a small description of the member. Most forum communities have no qualms about members posting some self-advertising messages in their signatures, as long as the advert is not too obtrusive. Therefore, forum members can make use of their signatures to post links to their websites or links to products that they are selling. By participating actively in forum communities, one can easily reach a large audience. Because everyone on the forum

Of course, care must be taken to ensure that you are following the proper etiquette as specified by the forum community and that you do not spam the forums. Spamming happens when someone joins in every discussion and posts useless comments that are not constructive. Spammers are often penalized by being banned from the forum for spamming their links in the forum.

About The Author

Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community at http://www.Buildtolearn.com, a forum community that discusses web-hosting and webmaster related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many others. Visit BuildtoLearn.com to learn more about developing and growing large communities.