Forum Signature - Free Traffic
This is the second review of Top 10 Organic Traffic Generation - How To Get FREE Traffic series.
This is a simple strategy to get free traffic by participating in the active and relevant forums of your niche market. Basically here’s what you need to do:
- Finding the active and relevant forums of your niche market.
You can use your favorite search engines such as Google then search for: “your keywords” + forum. - Take a peek of those forum and see if they are active or not.
You can decide whether the forum is active or not by viewing its statistic:- How many members it has?
- How many active members are currently online?
- How many topics are there?
- When was the last post posted? If it’s been a couple days since it was posted then the forum is not active.
- Join the forum if it’s active and relevant to your niche market.
Make sure that you read and understand the forum’s guideline and rule before you start posting. - Introduction section is good way to start.
Formally introduce yourself there. No hard sell please.
- Let your signature do the talking.
Many forums are strict with their rules. And their administrators can be merciless at times. You can get your post deleted or your account suspended if you don’t observe their rules.I know because my friend got his post deleted simply because he put his link in his post. He didn’t sell anything at that time. He only helped answering a question and suggested a product/service to solve the problem.
So the safe way to get free traffic from forums is by using your forum signature.
Based on my experience, free traffic using forum signature surely takes time to do it. And once you stop participating in those forums, your traffic stops. However there are two things that I like about forums:
- It’s great way to do market research! You will know all the concerns, questions and suggestions in your niche markets, which you can use to your advantage.
- You build your reputation and brand.
Bonus:
Many forums don’t allow HTML code. So instead of HTML code you can use this simple code to write your forum signature with active link 
[url=http://www.yourdomainname.com]Your signature[/url] for example [url=http://aldianprakoso.com]Aldian Prakoso[/url], and it will look like this Aldian Prakoso
or,
[url="http://www.yourdomainname.com"]Your signature[/url] for example [url="http://aldianprakoso.com"]Aldian Prakoso[/url], and it will look like this Aldian Prakoso
One of these two codes work in almost any forums. The difference between those two is just quotes. Notice that the first code doesn’t use quote and the second code uses quote for the link.
Comment by DerekBeau on 29 June 2007:
Good post. I touched on this subject recently at my blog as well. I completely agree with you about letting your signature do the talking, if you post links in your main content, you are risking being seen as a spammer.
You could, however, register as a “third party” and link to a couple helpful posts, sandwiching your own link between others
Comment by Aldian on 29 June 2007:
Welcome to Bright Begining! Derek and thank you for your useful tips
Pingback by THE PHARAOHS on 20 August 2007:
Comment by mlankton on 4 September 2007:
I was a long time member of a big web forum related to my niche, and you are absolutely right. After Google, my biggest referrer is people following my .sig on that forum.
Comment by Aldian on 7 September 2007:
Absolutely Mlankton. The correct forum generates targeted traffic as long as we are active participating there.
Comment by drugtests on 2 July 2008:
posting links in main content is really a dubious task to perform………………..