Affiliate Marketing Forums - Find Gold Among The Sharks And Learn To Make Money Online

Affiliate marketing forums are an important tool for anyone who wants to learn to make money online. Chances are that you have already explored a forum or two already, perhaps as a "lurker" which is a forum guest that is not registered as a member with posting privileges.In order to gain real value from online forums of internet marketers you will want to determine which forums are worth the time to become a participating member and dig the real gold that is available to those who can post new messages and reply to others.The two key benefits to becoming a registered member of the forum are:1.) The ability to post messages for the purpose of asking a question and getting an answer that will help you overcome a hurdle in making money online. Typically, you will get more than one answer and all answers may be correct.2.) Registered members, sometimes those with a minimum number of posts, are allowed to create a "signature" area that appears after every post of theirs. This signature is a place to advertise your websites and any product you have - even a free report that you use for list building. These links to your resources also can give you SEO benefit in the form of backlinks.Free Affiliate Marketing Forums versus Paid MembershipWhile everyone likes to get things for free, especially online information, there are many differences between free affiliate marketing forums and those that are paid membership based.Let us discuss a couple of the more significant ones here:1.) Free forums have a tendency to be more anonymous and often times result in inflamatory responses or "flaming". Many members will come and go without regard to building a reputation; or, perhaps even sign up under several user names for the purpose of promotion or deceit.Paid membership forums, on the other hand, will foster more of a "family" or "community" feel where people will have a tendency to let their guard down more, and share information with you that they refuse to share with just anybody.Some of this information includes affiliate marketing secrets that, if widely known, lose their effectiveness. Sharing on a limited scale in a private forum would not have that detrimental affect and allow the affiliate guru to feel comfortable giving it out to their "family".2.) When you see information posted on a free internet marketing forum you really have to do your own due diligence to ensure that it is not just a carefully crafted advertisement for a product or service that the poster is promoting. Remember, he or she may have multiple accounts on a free forum and appear as different people - people I refer to as "sharks".Scams like this not only take your money from you, but they also deflect you from the path you need to take to be successful making money online. While money can be replaced, time cannot be.Paid membership forums allow only one member profile per subscription. Yes, a wealthy marketer could buy multiple memberships for scamming purposes, but those type of posts are more easily seen through in a private community and quickly culled out if attempted and the member banned.There is such a higher level of trust in a paid forum that people such as myself who belong to both kinds of forums will find themselves spending the most time and getting the most value from the paid membership.I believe affiliate marketing forums are an important, even necessary, tool to learn to make money online. I have written an article describing my favorite free and favorite paid membership forums at my website http://Learn-To-Make-Money.com.