These days there is simply too much information for any one person to digest. And if you try to take it all in, or even a good portion of what seems relevant to your business, you’re going to spend more of your time reading about how to make money, than actually making it. Everyone, and I mean everyone, needs to rely on others they trust to wade through the good and the bad and distill the good stuff to a useable form. For us Internet marketers, that means belonging to an IM forum.
But not all IM forums are created equal. There are generally 3 types of Internet marketing forums – 2 of which you ought to avoid like the plague. The first of these is the free forum. These have tens, or hundreds of thousands of members. As for their content, it would be generous to say you get what you pay for but it’s actually worse than that. Much of the information is simply bad advice and/or people promoting their own product of the day. Think of Warrior Forum for example. Every day dozens of gurus put release their latest $1000 per day gadget and every day the same people lap it up. It works in that it does make money for the guru but these gadgets and methods, if they work at all, don’t work for long due to saturating the market. At best they can play a small part of a more comprehensive and/or original strategy.
The free forums look very appealing with loads of information and , did I mention, they’re free. But they are a tar pit you should avoid early in your IM career.
The next type is the private, one-time-fee forum. These have a superficial allure, after all, people pay for access to these forums so the quality of the advice, tools, discussion, etc. has to be high doesn’t it? The problem is that once you pay the one-time fee the forum administrator’s incentive to produce quality is significantly diminished. Sure good quality can get additional sales by word of mouth, but so can fancy marketing with less effort. Also, even though you’ve paid the one-time flat fee, expect to be hit up time and again to pay an extra cost to get access to a special section or brand new tool.
The final type, and the only type of IM forum I recommend, is the private forum that charges a monthly fee. The only way a forum like this survives is to keep its members happily paying their monthly dues, and the only way to do this is for them to produce winning tools and strategies that are easily understood and implemented by their members. There are actually many of these types types of IM forums which are very good. Depending on how long you’ve been doing IM you might not have come across any of them yet simply due to how dominant the free forums are among the newbie crowd. But the sooner you ditch the freebies and start investing the relatively small monthly sub for one of these into your business the better.
Here’s my three favourite private, monthly-fee-based IM forums:
- Stack That Money
- IMGrind
- Chad’s SEO Cash Club
There are others I like but I’ll just say a little about each of these three favourites. Then I’ll tell you a well-kept secret about how to get access to them all, as well as some other good private subscription based forums and tools.
Stack That Money
There is a lot of good content in here. Veterans and users who are already making money are part of this forum and their strategies are excellent. They also have some beginners content in here as well, where you can simply read on how to start a campaign. You will see great case studies on Plenty of Fish and Facebook. They also have a ton of case study or follow along threads. These threads are actual members posting their strategies and getting feedback from the community. They also have some neat tools for use with pay per view, POF, Facebook and Adwords campaigns.
IMGrind
This forum was established by two highly successful IM marketing experts. It’s focus is on CPA affiliate marketing but there is plenty of content on all other aspects of IM as well. There are some nice tutorials about how to maximize your use of some other standard IM tools. Tons of great content on lead generation and traffic building.
Chad’s SEO Cash Club
None of these 3 picks are terribly old but this one is the relative newcomer. Chad’s been there and done that. His forum has a limited membership and is currently closed to new members but you can get on a waiting list. That’s part of the beauty of these monthly subscription forums, the admins don’t need to recruit massive members to make some nice cash so they can keep it small and don’t mind sharing their juiciest secrets with such a small closed group. And this forum contains some very juicy tips and tools for very quickly getting traffic, making serious money with Adsense, and much more.
Why chose one when you can have them all, and more?
Ok, so here’s the part where I tell you the one I recommend and why. Except, I’ve got something better than that. I’ve discovered a way to get access to all of them and a lot more for less than the cost of just one of these alone. By the way, they all cost at least $99/month. Fill out the form here below and I’ll email you the secret. Talk soon.
Rachel