Finding Forums

I know this sounds obvious, but searching in Google, Facebook and YouTube has really helped me to see which groups/forums are out there.

Learning to make effective searches is an art form, Scott.

Determine the questions your audience is asking. Search on those questions with [forum] in the query: “How to build wealth forum” … read through the conversations and see where those folks are going/referencing … you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but put your detective hat on and dive in. Just don’t spam … never spam. Be helpful and listen.

Brainstorming ideas of one person in your niche, the problems that person has, and what he/she would likely search for online would be good ways to start coming up with ideas. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to identify what to search for on Google.

For example, for self help – there are many people who are interested in self-help. If your niche is married couples (just choosing something out of the air), and you think of the problems married couples might have – disagreements, money, in-law issues, porn addiction – to name a few, then you can start looking for fora that deal with these things. I just did a quick search and there are porn addiction fora as well as broad-based marriage fora.

If you have a keyword tool, that may be helpful as well. But I think your first step is to figure out who your ideal customer would be and go from there.

Hope that helps.

Do your competitors have Facebook groups? If so, join in, meet people without selling them, and see what kinds of conversations are happening. You can also follow your competitors on Twitter. The great thing about social media is that the search engines will try to match you with people of “like mind” and some of those are likely to be prospects for you.

Put your keywords in Facebook search and see what groups it suggests as a place to start.

Thanks, everyone… it’s good to hear about how each of you are going about all of this. It does sound like observing the conversations of your competitors would be very instructive.

Try searching Google for Forum Directory – several come up, such as findaforum.net – some niches may be listed in more directories than others

I agree with Don – you have to kiss alot of frogs.

When I am doing research like this I might literally look at 200 sites . . . discarding most fast.

That is discouraging, so it’s easy to quit.

but if you took 5 hours, found 300 and only 5 were productive . . .

would it be worth 5 hours to find 5?

Try this:
make a list of 100 keywords (or my favorite, keyphrases)

then use this formula:

type this into google:

keyword inurl:forum

for example: weight loss inurl:forum

try that, tell us what you find, then come back for more . .

Sean

Ann Smarty has an excellent (may still be free) Udemy course on putting together search terms, Scott. It’s way worth a visit.

Somebody will do it for you on Fiverr for 5 bucks….

I’d start with the places where forums are known to exist.

Facebook, for example, has something like 100K.

LinkedIn is a kind of forum. You can answer questions there.

So is Quora and Reddit.

You can also do a search on Google for “your niche” +forum.