It's almost impossible to find a niche that doesn't have some relevant forum dedicated to it. All that's needed now is to find the forums that get the lion's share of the traffic in your niche so you can put your plan into motion. The entire plan doesn't have to take nearly as long as you might imagine. It takes time and some patience to extract the most value from forums. It's up to you what the best choice might be.
Remember that your goal is to be viewed as an expert in your niche. It's important to build a good reputation in the forum. That's the only way to place yourself in a position for prime results. But before you can accomplish those two objectives, you have to be seen. What you want to avoid is spending a lot of time in any forum. After all, there are other things you need to do to market your business too.
But coming in and taking over with a large number of posts in a short amount of time will be counter-productive. Create posts at times when the maximum amount of traffic is likely to hear what you have to say. Make sure the posts you do provide are quality posts rather than simply confirming what others are saying link or going repeating points already made.
Forum marketing is totally about building relationships with other members. You can also view this as networking and that would be correct, too. But viewing them as relationships helps put you in a more personable frame of mind. They payout for building these relationships is that people are more comfortable doing business with people they feel they know. Plan all your actions according to this. Familiarity is one of the most powerful things to remember when it comes to building forum relationships. If you are hardly there during the week, or maybe not there at all on some weeks, then you'll be a stranger to everybody.
Before you join a forum, there are some things you need to understand about them, two of which include business and nonbusiness related types and actions. If you can't sell anything on the forum, then it's obviously pointless to actually join them. Finding my sources as much information about the forums that you want to join is an excellent idea. This is not the only consideration that you should make. There is no rocket my response science involved, but there are very specific and unique guidelines to follow. There are so many factors that will contribute to, or diminish, your efforts trying to market on forums. Your success online basically comes down to proper preparation, and understanding how the marketing method works. Forums are exactly the same.
So think of forum marketing as another form of social marketing. When you look at it, forum marketing is another way to do social marketing. They are both deeply rooted in relationship marketing, which you should thoroughly understand.