It's always a smart idea to have a plan of action for everything you do in business including forum marketing. You will not have any problems with reaching your goals, but you should know what they are and how forums can help you. Many of the online marketers who become successful do well because they think this way about business. First, they learn as much as possible about different marketing strategies. Then this information is tweaked to find the best outcome.
Pursuing a particular method of marketing on the Internet is something that you should understand to some degree before you do it. For online marketing to work for you, specifically in forums, you should know why this method is viable. If you want to do forum marketing, you should know that it's very similar to networking, but with a specific audience, not just businesses. It's not just networking, per se, but actually relationship marketing to some degree. The latter is the most important of the two, and it's what you'll use in most other forms of marketing. People like to use forms to build the brand name of their business, something that cannot be done very easily elsewhere. The key is to offer "over the top" value for everything that you have, thus gaining exposure will benefit your brand name immensely. When you are synonymous with value, then your forum reputation will grow.
Don't just comment on existing threads. Start your own threads as well. If you're new to forums or marketing in them, you may feel a little shy about starting threads. Begin by thinking of information you have that can be valuable to the community and share it. Don't forget to invite others to join in and offer their own comments to the thread as well.
If you really want to invite commentary, try saying something that's a little controversial. Just be wary of crossing lines or coming across as uninformed and/or judgmental. Just make sure, above all else, that you start threads that fit with the theme of the forum.
In line with other comments about how you conduct yourself, or the attitude you create, you have to just be relaxed and cool in forums. If you frequent the forums a lot, you will come into many people. Some people just can't help but talk down to others. You'll see folks who are habitually negative and complain a lot. A majority of member will ignore these people, which will make them drop out of sight. These are the unwritten rules of forum marketing. So, decide what is the most important to you. You will have to make a look at this site few tweaks if you want to succeed with forum marketing.
You can think about forum marketing in a similar way as social marketing. And it is a given that forum marketing is like social marketing. They are both deeply rooted in relationship marketing, which you should thoroughly understand.