Forums, Guestbooks and Comments for Newbies in Internet Marketing

Why waste your time talking and helping out strangers on the Internet? Why waste your time reading their blogs and posting comments on people you don't know at all? Do you really need to invite people to leave comments and information on your site's guestbook?

If you are an aspiring Internet marketer, the answer to all those questions is a big yes! Why? Because you are planning to enter and hopefully penetrate a virtual market, where buyers and sellers don't actually meet. Buyers and sellers interact on a virtual platform through forums, blogs, guestbooks, and comments. These are today's marketing tools.

Forums help you learn about your target market. Reading other people's forum will tell you a lot about their personalities. You can learn from forums what these people need and how your product or service can come into picture. And participating in the discussion will allow you to subtly market your product and services. Some forums allow direct marketing of products, some don't. Some other fall in the middle-allowing marketing up to a certain point but not directly promoting products. These kinds of forums allow URLs of your website with your signature and such. Your best option would be the in-betweens, because forums that allow direct marketing or promotion are usually go haywire, with a lot of participants competing for market share. So it's best to settle with a nice, well-organized discussion that allows subtle marketing leaving URLs and links on your posts. Participation in forums will also gain you trust of the community, which is very important, as trust is the major basis of all purchases.

Another tool for Internet marketing is blogging. Everybody is blogging so should you! You may be surprised with the exposure you can get from blogging. Your website traffic can definitely double when you have blogs in your site, especially if you have a separate but identical blog hosted at a hosted blog site. This would allow you to post links to your website every time you create a blog entry and it would surely improve search engine optimization. Make it appoint that you post a blog at least twice or thrice a week if not every day. The more updated your blog is, the more people would regularly visit your site, checking and waiting for your next post-especially if you are a good writer. You should always research and get updated with the latest trends and hype. So visit other people's sites and read their blogs to know what the new talk of the town is-what's in and what's not.

Now, guestbooks, what good do they do? A guestbook is a portion of your website, or an entire web page, which allows your visitors to leave a comment about you, your site and your products. They can leave both positive and negative feedback. The good and the bad thing about that is that other visitors can see their comments. If the comments are rave reviews of your products and services, then that's good. It would serve as a testimonial to your credibility and dependability. And it would go around, spreading through the word of mouth. And there is nothing more powerful than word-of-mouth advertising.

However, if they are negative comments, other visitors would know of it too. But if you are confident with your products and services, you have nothing to be afraid of. Even if you receive a negative comment, you can reply through the guestbook and propose to remedy the problem. This would even strengthen your credibility as someone they can depend on in answering their complaints. The guestbook's interactive feature also gives you chance to have a personal relationship with your customers and make them feel you are concern about them. You will gain their trust by sincerely replying to their comments, answering their questions, offering solutions to their problems, or simply thanking them for visiting your website and leaving a message.

The comments your visitors leave on your blogs and guestbooks would greatly help you in improving your products and services. Sure, there would be some that only want to create issues or just play pranks on your website but most of them would be honest to goodness opinions based on their actual experiences. Besides, honest users would know the difference between pranks and sincere comments. They would surely just ignore people who are clearly just creating troubles.

So, what are you waiting for? Invite people and invite yourself in!