Even though it is essential to increase your rating with search engines, to purchase pay-per-clicks, and to participate in link exchanges and banner exchanges, discussion forums can often provide an extra, non-conventional sales medium to your campaign that allows you to quickly pull in customers with personal contact and conversational presentations of your product.

You can find these boards by searching for specific product you sell and then adding word “messageboard” or “forum” or “discussion forum” after it in quotations. For instance, I sell marketing tools and online business-builders on one of my websites, so when I look for forums to market my products in, I go to google or overture and type in “business messageboard” or “marketing forum.” Find as many of these highly-trafficked forums as you can and sign-up. Some of them will require you to confirm it through your email address.

Before you begin actually posting on boards, you need to lay down some general rules of approach. I would suggest following methods, but you can decide for yourself what you think is appropriate for your business and situation.

These are my rules:

When I market on discussion forums, I always try to provide more for board than I take away from it in potential sales. Not only is it ethical, but it’s also good business. When people ask questions, I use expertise I’ve gained from Internet business-building and marketing to legitimately answer their questions. If I signed up for every board I could find, and then slapped a boilerplate marketing pitch on every site, I’d just get ignored or banned.

Your parents, your teachers in school, your minister or teachers in church, your youth group leader and others all attempt to teach this civilized and courteous behavior from a very young age. Most children use "Thank You" without even thinking about it.

As adults, too many people forget this seemingly minor consideration when dealing in business world. This lapse can have a very profound effect on success of your business.

Even in high-speed world of today, polite and courteous people stand out from crowd. In rush to complete your work, it's all too easy to forget to use "Thank You" with your customers, employees, vendors and others that you come in contact with on a daily basis.