A Tour of the Warrior Forum
The Warrior Forum is one of the biggest and longest standard forums dedicated to Internet Marketing. Now established for over 10 years, it boasts over 700,000 posts having been made by over 30,000 members.
Lurking Around the Forum
I’ve heard about the Warrior Forum several times over the last few months. It has a reputation for being rather hostile towards newbies and if you look through the list of forum sections you certainly won’t find any beginner areas. On the other hand there are many very successful and high profile Internet marketers that spend a lot of time on the Warrior Forum and have gained a lot of respect there.
If you click the members tab at the top of the forum you’ll see the members ranked according to their rating at the number of posts they have made. Check out some of these guys:
- Willie Crawford, he put together the 20 Ways to Make $100 a Day ebook
- Josh Spaulding, runs his own IM blog and recently wrote a free SEO ebook
- Jason Moffat, prominent member of the 30DC
- Harvey Segal, has written several free ebooks
- Mike Filsaime, one of the biggest names in IM, created Butterfly Marketing
- Andy Beard, runs a highly successful blog about niche marketing
So there is plenty of real people on the forum and many of them are very generous with their posts offering a wealth of free and useful information. I was also interested to note that there were quite a few female names mixed in there. Glad to know this field is not entirely male dominated!
Forum Sections
There are several prominent sections in the Warrior Forum:
Warrior Special Offer Forum - the WSO forum allows members to post ads (costing $20) selling their own products at a discounted price to Warrior members. From the perspective of the reader, this is a great place to pick up deals on IM products but it’s rather like eBay - you have to set yourself some limits or you could be spending money all day in there!
From the perspective of the buyer, the WSO forum is usually a nice place to get a few quick sales but it wont bring much long term income because once your offer drops off the front page it wont see nearly as much traffic.
Free ebook Forum - This is the one I am interested in as a way of promoting my own WordPress ebook. Again, this is not something I expect to get many downloads from as once the post has dropped off the front page then it wont get much attention. For forum readers though, there must be a goldmine of information in here though I imagine there is a lot of crap too.
JV Forum - I occasionally get approached by somebody wanting to JV with me on something or other. It’s not really my thing at the moment but if you’re looking for a JV partner for your new product or venture then this would be a great place to start looking.
The Best Warrior Threads List - forums being what they are tend to house a lot of fluff along with the good stuff. This best threads list is housed on a separate domain and has over 100 of the best threads. This is a great place to start looking for some great information.
Your Warrior Profile & Signature
One of the ways in which the Warrior Forum gets used is as a method of driving traffic back to some site. In the profile section you can upload a picture and up to three links of your choice as well as entering various bits of biographical information. I just linked to my blog in my profile.
The profile page also shows the total number of posts made and has a list of your most recent topics. As you contribute more to the forum your ‘rank’ increases. My buddy Josh is listed as a Senior Warrior member which means that readers are likely to take far more notice of his posts than of mine. Every post that you make links to your profile, shows the number of posts that you have made and also includes a forum signature. Be sure to check these instructions on making signatures.
As you can see I’ve not been participating in this forum (too busy reading blogs!) but I’ve filled out my profile a little. I’ve also created a signature with a link to my blog and to my ebook.
Promoting my Ebook
The reason I’ve created this post is that I wanted to use the free ebook forum as a way of promoting my WordPress ebook. Ideally I would have spent some time using the forum as a contributor and not just a lurker and developed my own profile a bit but I simply don’t feel qualified to offer my opinion on anything yet. This is very much how I started in blogging - I lurked only, never commented.
Anyway, it’s only one post and it won’t last long on the front page so to be honest it’s not going to make a huge difference if I am an obvious newbie. The first thing I did was have a good read of the rules for this forum and then I spent some time just checking out some of the existing threads to see how people used the forum.
What I noticed is that most people just made an ordinary post that told other members a little bit about the book and included a link - there was no ’sales pitch’ within the post. I was quite pleased by that as I’m somewhat allergic to sales pitches, especially writing them!
One note about this forum - it is open to any member to promote any free ebook. You do not have to be the author in order to post. As it happens, somebody else did the job for me! Here is the post linking to my ebook:
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=223899
This is good and bad. It’s good because the poster has already contributed to the forum and I haven’t and of course it always looks good when somebody else promotes your work on your behalf. But of course there is a downside in that I cannot control what goes in the post and I can’t make my own post now as it would be against the rules. However, Dana seems to have done a great job and there’s even a few replies saying that they liked the book so it’s all good.
Just goes to show that if you procrastinate long enough, somebody will do your work for you!
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Stumble it!
Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.com
March 3, 2008
Hi Caroline,
Just like you I have been belaying my participation in the Warrior Forum because I feel a bit intimidated, as you describe.
I preferred the much more friendlier bloggeries forum, and currently I try to participate and contribute as much as possible.
Love your last remark… lol!
Cheers,
Alex.
Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.com’s last blog post..How-To: Hiding Your Affiliate Links