Marketing To Forums: Part 2

Although posting on forums can be a great way to send some
free traffic wherever you want it, you have to do it
right. Otherwise, you won't get much worthwhile traffic at
all.

I've mentioned before that you should only post an
advertisement in the signature of your forum postings.
Don't make the message an advertisement.

But if your ad is in your signature, then you need to make
sure people *see* your signature. This is obvious, but
many people make it difficult to see their signature.

Typically, when you respond to a post by someone else on a
forum, the original message is, by default, included with
your response. Often, people will type their response and
leave the original message below their response.

Here's an example of what I mean.

-----
Here's a response to some message that someone else
posted.

And here's some more of my response.

> Here's the original message
> from the person who I'm responding
> to.
-----

Here's why this is important. Your signature goes all the
way at the bottom of the message. This means that it will
be below the original message that's included below your
response.

How many people that read your response will continue to
read the original message as well? Most probably won't.
This means they'll never get to the bottom of the message
where your signature is. And if that's beyond the bottom
of the screen, then your signature may as well not be
there at all.

So I recommend deleting the original message from your
responses. If you want to respond directly to something
that someone else posted, then just include the part
you're responding to *in the body* of your message. This
way, your response will appear under the original
message.

You always want your signature to appear immediately after
*your* message.

Moving on. I've also mentioned that you shouldn't
advertise off-topic products in your signature. This is
especially true if you're posting on forums related to
internet marketing.

And here's why.

Let's say you post a message on a forum about how to
improve your search engine rankings. But in your
signature, you post an ad for herbal health supplements.

Let's ignore the fact that you're targeting the wrong
audience. There's another problem with this. A lot of
people who read your message may be looking for good
affiliate products to promote. So they might click your
link just to see if this might be a good affiliate
program.

In this case, you may be creating more competition for
yourself. You're giving people a link to an affiliate
program that's (presumably) working for you. Usually, I
would prefer to keep a good affiliate program to myself. I
don't need more people competing with me.

One last issue to think about when including links in your
signature. This complicates the picture a bit.

So far, I've been talking about how to effectively
advertise products to other people. But there's also
another good reason for including links in your signature.
You may want to advertise to search engines.

Here's what I mean by that. Whatever you post on a forum
will probably be indexed by search engines eventually. And
if there are links in your post, then the search engine
spiders will follow those links.

So your posts on forums could actually serve as incoming
links to your own web sites. If this is your purpose, then
you may want to formulate the title of your link a little
differently.

You should base your link title on keywords that are
appropriate for your web site. For example, if I'm selling
a product that cloaks affiliate links, I would probably
link to it with something like "cloak affiliate links" or
"cloaking affiliate links". And I would use the *same*
title for this link *every* time I posted it to a forum.

You can see that your approach to creating a signature for
forum posts will be different depending on what your
purpose is - to advertise to people or search engines. So
make sure you know what your purpose is, and link
accordingly.

P.S. If you missed the first article on marketing to
forums, you can read it now at
http://www.dave-brown.com/articles/forums1.html.