How To Use Forums To Advertise Your Affiliate Link

Its one thing to get setup as an affiliate with a certain program and quite another to actually start making money with your affiliate business. Generally speaking, money can only be made online with traffic. If you don’t get any traffic to your website or affiliate link, you will not make any money. How do we get that traffic? There are many ways, but let’s focus on the use of forums.

One of the things that make forums such a useful traffic gathering location is that someone else has done the targeting for you. We all want our ads and links targeted to people who have an interest in our products, that’s the idea behind Google’s Adsense program and many others. When you find a forum that is target towards the same industry that you are in, then that means that the bulk of those forum members already have an interest in your product or service. Any ad you place in front of their eyes is already targeted to the exact audience you’re looking for. If you sell lawn & garden accessories, look for a landscaping forum. If you provide information on a particular vacation site, look for a travel forum. If you have a program that allows you to access your office computer from home, look for a site for busy professionals. Once you find the forum that matches the product or service you have to offer, you’ve found your targeted buyers.

Now, how do you capitalize on these forum members that all are wanting your product or service, but just don’t know it yet? Ad placement is the next step. Don’t just make a post saying “Need flowers? Visit this website”. These ads are generally regarded as spam and are removed quite quickly, in fact if they are not they are not successful anyway as people tend to view them as ads and skip over them to get to the next posting with valuable information. Put your affiliate link in the signature file or profile that most forums have available to members. In many forums, at the bottom of every post you make will appear whatever is in your signature file. Then, every time you make a post or share a thought or idea, boom – your affiliate link is right there. Now, be careful as some forums do not allow affiliate links in their signature lines or profiles. The easiest thing to do in this case is to setup a website with some nice information or enticing looking splash page and have the affiliate link there. Now, when people read your thought provoking post, they see your link at the bottom, and then they check it out. There, you’ve got the traffic.

One of the hardest parts of web marketing is getting your site, affiliate link, or product in front of the eyes of the people you’re targeting. Forums have already found your target audience for you, now you just have to find the right forum.

If you’d like a great example of a well run forum on the subject of domaining, visit Namepros. Namepros has established a large community with many members and a growing number of moderators. There are places for newbies and experts as well as everyone in between. They hold live auctions in the chatroom as well as forum based auctions too.

Though you can buy and sell domains at Namepros, quite easily at times, the emphasis is not on that as much as it is on the networking of domain professionals. Truly a wonderful example of a forum based community.

Forum-Sites.com, the directory of active forums, is still accepting links to your forums.  These links are free and the more traffic the directory gets, the more chance of someone finding a link to your forum and following it.

Just go the main page here at forum-sites.com and click on Add A Site.

Forum Participation Leads To Brainstorming

Another valuable use of forums for the web savvy businessperson is as a source for more ideas. I’m not speaking of stealing people’s ideas, although adapting others’ strategies to your business may be a good idea. The concept we’re exploring here is that of assisted brainstorming.

You may read a thought provoking post by another forum member and that may be what gives you the nudge in a certain direction towards a unique business idea. Take someone else’s successful idea towards their online pet food business and apply it to your online DVD sales business, for example. Read about someone else’s successful web development idea, and then twist the idea and turn it on its head. What if instead of its original plan, you geared it towards user created content?

Many of the most creative people in the world frequent business development forums to share and tweak their ideas. Sharing and getting feedback about the ideas you currently have is also a valuable thing for you to do. But, don’t underestimate the ideas of others, they may be just what you need to kickstart an idea of your own.