Online forums are a great place to learn new things and communicate with like-minded folks on virtually any topic you can think of.  Health, hobbies, career or just passing on funny stories, there truly is a forum community for everyone.  They can also be a great place to promote your business, but I can count the number of spam posts I have been exposed to via forums on the hands and toes of every person living in Canada (maybe)!  Spam clogs up the web and has very little value, much of it is churned out by low-wage earners overseas.  But even at $1 or $2 an hour I don’t see the value in utter garbage like this:

But if done right, forum participation can have a huge value because it allows you to get up-close-and-personal with your target demographics.  It can be time consuming and it also takes some creativity but the value is enormous because this type of low-key marketing can bring in very high converting traffic.  As I have mentioned before I rather bring in 100 high converting (50%) than 1,000 (2%) very low converting visitors.  It might seem cheap to spam the web with tons of crap, hoping that some sticks but in the long-term you will also hurt your companies reputation and that should have the highest value of all.

Look below at a thread I started a few months ago on a hobby forum related to my clients business and look at the number of views.  Now that has real value, to any business.

Don’t get fooled by SEO’s, Link Builders or Online Marketers that throw impressively large numbers at you, like:

80,000 one-way, super duper links built for $199

We submit to 500 search engines for $49.99

Get to the top of Google for $99 a month

Submission to 10,000 web directories for $19.99

In the end, as in much of life, you get what you pay for.  And if you get penalized or banned from the search engines it could just be the worst deal you ever got.

Play it safe and only go for search marketing that offers real value over time.