Benefits: You cultivate relationships with others You learn about all kinds of topics Your marketing message is presented without screaming advertisement By answering questions related to your topic, you are positioned as an expert in your field

How to Use a Forum for Promotion: First, find a forum that is of interest to you and frequented by people in your target market. A great place to start is to go to ezboard.com and search for forums by keywords that reflect your target market.

Next, I suggest you "lurk" or just watch activity for a few days to get a feel for tone of forum. When you feel confident this is an appropriate place to represent your business, introduce yourself. Often message boards have a 'New Members' type place to post your first message.

By Veselin Andreev Written in April 2003 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What do key words represent?

Key words - these are words that users enter in a given search engine to find services or products you offer. It is extremely important to know what key words they will use. Selecting appropriate for your activity key words is first thing you have to do because all other strategies are built on their right choice.

How to select appropriate for you key words?

Key words that will work best for you means to describe exactly what you offer and meanwhile to be well used by users. If your website is ranked number one in search engines results, after using key words that nobody uses, your work will be useless.

• Don't count just on you when selecting appropriate for your business key words. The users might have a completely different view about what to insert in search engines to find you.

Wonderful implement for defining appropriate key words is a specialized database called Wordtracker. First make a list with appropriate key words that you think are similar to your products or services. You could make such a list by asking your clients how they would search your services or products in Internet or you could view your competitors' websites about what key words they had used, but don't copy their information. Just look if they had used some key words that could be useful for you. Then use Wordtracker database, which will show you every key word's popularity, and how competitive it is (i.e. is it used a lot by users and how many websites are optimized for it). As more they are, as harder your website will reach top in search engines ranking.