The Forum Challenge
Here's an easy challenge for you, to add 100 links to your site in four minutes or less.
It won't work for everyone, but if you've been on the Internet for any length of time, you're probably ready to go for this.
It's a challenge, so I want you to tell me how you get on in the column field.
Here's all you have to do.
Find a forum that you've posted on a few times. It doesn't matter if you've posted on it recently. It really doesn't have to be an internet marketing forum. In fact, this probably works better with non-internet marketing forums. So think about what you're interested in. Books. Dogs. Poker. Coffee. Technical support for your ipod. Anywhere you've made a few posts is fine.
Now login, find your profile and edit it.
Find the signature. Change it to add a link to your personal homepage.
This can be a site, a blog, even your facebook profile or twitter account. If you don't have any of these, create one. Even a simple site is useful for promotion.
It's important that you're linking to a personal page, not a business page, as you want this to be a natural and non-commercial link. Almost all forums let you have links like this in your signature.
Of course, it's not a problem for you to have a few links from your personal page to your business and your products. That way, you're improving the ranking of and traffic to your personal site, and from there the ranking of and traffic to your products.
Save the signature and check out all your pre-existing posts. They should now have your signature at the bottom. If you've been around the forum for any length of time, that's going to be over 100 posts, now all linked to your site.
What's better, most of the posts will already be indexed by the search engines and rank well for all sorts of long-tail search terms.
A pretty neat result for content you've already written and is just sitting doing nothing!
Did you try the forum challenge? Reply below and let the world know if it worked for you.
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This is a pretty overlooked idea, but does it actually gain you large amounts of traffic?
Personally I have forum accounts which have thousands of posts. On one I linked my youtube account to test this theory and gained a few hundred views in a week, which is a pretty good result considering the youtube account had no videos on it.
I tested something similar by making a new youtube account and placing the channel within my Xbox live profile. After a few weeks of playing I had a few hundred views with little effort considering I was just playing my Xbox live as a hobby. I'd recommend that if you play any games over the internet to place links within your gaming profiles.
Jamie, yes those are fantastic results that you've demonstrated. Most people just don't think too much about their forum accounts. I know I've got some based on niches which I'm interested in, but which I don't actively have products in, which I could easily use for exposure if I wanted to go into those niches.
The Xbox profiles are a very underlooked source considering the amount of time and money people spend on gaming,
The one question is, how do you monetize the traffic that can be gained from playing xbox live as a hobby. At first I thought that a simple landing page with gaming information and a bunch of ads on it would probably make a little cash for a small effort. Then I decided that the small amount of traffic probably wouldn't be worth the domain costs.
I read that using CPA offers with stuff that are to do with the console works pretty well, but I am yet to test this idea.
I tried this out on some forums I post on regularly and noticed s difference. I was wondering if this would work on facebook and Twitter?
I have not participated very much in forums, but I can see how valuable this method is. Over the years I have joined forums but have not been one to regularly participate. I am rethinking that now. Just contributing, even a little bit can go a long way.
Yes, contributing is important – and it's valuable long term.
Emily, I've not tried this so much on Facebook and Twitter. I do retweet people I know occasionally, and people do the same to me, so there's definitely some potential to build relationships there. And I'm sure that the forum like facebook communities will work in similar ways, although some of their use is dependent on how easy they make it to link out to other places.
If anyone has tried this, do share your results with us.
Thom