Find Your Clients Using Message Boards

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

You can generate thousands of dollars of business every month just from message boards. In this article, we'll cover a few of the most popular internet message boards for finding clients for work-at-home projects.

ð  WarriorForum

The Warrior Forum is one of the largest internet marketing forums online. The audience tends to be between beginners to the moderately successful, with just a handful of truly successful posters.

The Warrior Forum has two sections to pay attention to: The Warrior Special Offers forum and the Warriors for Hire section. Both of these sections are great places to advertise for freelance services.

Writing, copywriting, graphic design and web design all tend to do well at the Warrior Forum.

ð  WickedFire

WickedFire is a tricky place to market on. WickedFire is another internet marketing forum, specifically for affiliate marketers. Unlike the Warrior Forum, WickedFire consists mainly of marketers who make a lot of money. A large percentage of the forum makes well over $10,000 a month.

The downside is that it has a very specific culture you need to get acclimated to before you can do business there. They're not very friendly towards outsiders or "newbies."  That said, if you can find a service that attracts this crowd, there is a lot of money to be made.

Services that tend to do well include link building, backlink wheels and multi-tier linking systems. Content does so-so in this forum.

ð  Digital Point

Digital point is yet another popular internet marketing board. The audience tends to be much more entry level and the bids for projects much lower.

Unless you're really desperate to get your first few paying clients, you may want to avoid Digital Point.

ð  Craigslist

Craigslist is an often underutilized site for finding clients. On one hand, there's a lot of spam on the site and getting noticed can be tricky. On the other hand, craigslist's sheer traffic makes it attractive to just about anyone looking for work.

You can post an advertisement in the Services section for free, advertising your services. Alternatively, you can look in the Gigs section for people looking for your services.

Experiment with several different headlines and ads. Consider hiring someone for $1 a post or so to repost your ad whenever possible, instead of having to do it on your own.

ð  Elance.com, Guru.com

There are plenty of other boards and job listing sites to post on. Elance and Guru are two of the more well-known ones.

The main benefit of using freelance sites is that they get a lot of targeted traffic. You have hundreds of thousands of people coming through every month, looking for your services.

The downside is the competition. You're often competing against people from India or the Philippines who can drastically undercut you because they have a lower cost of living. Therefore, their bids are often lower as well.

Freelance sites are a great place to get low to moderate bids, but they're difficult to scale up to high-end projects on.

These are some of the most popular message boards online for finding clients. Choose the one(s) that appeal the most to you and start fine-tuning your sales message.