It's always a smart idea to have a plan of action for everything you do in business including forum marketing. You will not have any problems with reaching your goals, but you should know what they are and how forums can help you. When it comes to being successful, many internet marketers go on to better things because they treat business in this manner. First, they research and get information on different marketing methods. Then they try to figure how they can benefit from this knowledge.
If you want to be viewed as an expert in your niche, you must begin by working to create a good reputation. A failure in either task will net results that are not at all optimal. But you can't really get noticed as an authority without first being seen. What you want to avoid is spending a lot of time in any forum. Keep in mind that this is only part of your marketing plan.
On the other hand, if you dive right in and make a mountain of posts, it annoys the long-term members. So time your visits when there are the most members present. Focus on providing quality posts if you're really interested in becoming influential on the forum. There are several things that you need to consider when you go to a forum your very first time. You should look for some things before ever deciding to join. Since your primary purpose is to market your products and services, a few things need to be known. Consider the fact that most forum owners are not very fond of IMers in general. This is something that will probably not occur if the owner is not very fond of IMers like yourself. You can sometimes find that out by reading the forum rules. The absence of links, and signatures, at the bottoms of posts is a clear sign online marketing is not allowed. The vast majority of forums, even if they allow signatures, don't allow you to directly market to the community anyway. If they did, then the entire place would be one giant billboard and people would not like it.
Don't even think about networking on a forum until you know who the 'top dog' on the forum is, so to speak. Most of the time there are a few people who could easily claim this role. The membership numbers will also influence this. The longer the forums have been around and more members it has, the greater the number of people who influence the forums will be. So it just depends on the particular forum, and with some forums unfortunately it can be a moderator who has this strong influence. With senior members and moderators you'll often be able to recognize others attempting to garner favor. Once you've identified them, it's time to start building relationship with these members.
So think of forum marketing as another form of social marketing. When you look the original source at it, forum marketing is another way to do social marketing. They are both deeply rooted in relationship marketing, which you should thoroughly understand.