For the online marketer, forum marketing is one of the simplest and most effective investments of time and attention available. It's something that can be done in any niche by any one. You'll have a hard time finding a niche without active forums though some will have more than others.
Some business owners prefer to avoid forum marketing in pursuit of various 'high value' marketing options. Be that as it may, you can accomplish many goals it you're a niche marketer.
A 'terms of service' or (TOS) page is the most important page to read before you begin marketing on your forum. The longer you're able to remain an active member, the greater your profit potential will be. If you violate their TOS, then you can be banned for a short while or for life. It's not about whether or not you've read them. It's your responsibility to know and honor the terms of service. There are generally deep feelings about it on behalf of site owners and moderators. Anything else they may have in terms of guidelines and policies should be read and followed.
Forum marketing is totally about building relationships with other members. Think of it as solidifying your network. But viewing them as relationships helps put you in a more personable frame of mind. If people feel like they know you; they'll be more confident about doing business with you. Everything you do in the forums needs to be done with this in mind. If you're serious about building forum relationships you'll want to keep familiarity in mind. You have to be imp source there and contribute on the forums regularly if you really want to build a serious presence.
You'll find that some of the people on forums seem to always be starting new threads. I don't really care about look at this site it, but it creates impressions in other people that are not always positive. Don't start a ton of new threads at one time. Put a little space between them.
Don't forget to make posts and comment on other threads too. Human nature will show quite often on forums. That being said, you sometimes need to have your own opinion and stand by it too. Forum marketing provides marketers with many different gray areas. If it's at all possible you want to find as many unique ways to share your knowledge with other forum members.
You can work a lot of forums and still only devote about five hours a week to the effort and, bring in a ton of profit from forum marketing. It doesn't get much higher in value than that when it comes to marketing. But just be sure you diversify your marketing so you get all you can from it and help insulate your business from business and web turbulence.