I just launched off an affiliate landing page and I decided to try promoting it in just forums to see the results. I haven't optimized it for the search engines or implemented any other marketing strategies. For some odd reason it doesn't seem to be working too well. Very few forum members are even clicking on my download button which surprises me. Is it my landing page? Or do forums even work? I have a similar landing page that gets traffic from the search engines and it's converting quite well.
Keep in mind some forums (including this one) hide signatures from visitors and you can only see them when you're logged in. Then the users have an option of disabling seeing signatures too. If you take all of this into consideration you're probably left with about 40-60% of users who may actually see your signature. Out of that, maybe only 1-5% of them may take interest in it. It's purely a guess, but I don't think I am far from where the reality is.
It's all about relevancy and level of exposure, make sure your targeting the right forums for your niche/product and try to make it as eye catching as possible. Signature marketing via forums is not going to bring you huge conversions but it certainly has it's place in your marketing strategy when done well- regardless of your niche. WebDev
Forums do work but strategies change. Driving traffic to your money site simply from forum signature may not suffice as it creates an opportunity to spamming. On the other hand if you search for the related questions that are asked in several forums and post your answers in all those forums you will get lots of traffic to your money site. Getting traffic from one forum only thus is not good, rather if you try to participate in no of forums related to your money site, forums are the best platforms to drive traffic.
Is that a new logo? I tend to agree. I was just thinking the answer is inherently no. And likely still is. However... when you have a ton of posts and already have some authority then sure, it can help because people actually listen to what you say. If its your intent to deal with forums you are new on etc. its a waste of time and, the link itself in a sig for instance, is useless. do follow, no follow or otherwise. Not a huge fan of the place but it sorta sounds like a job for warrior forums.
Forums for me helped with what i like to call cross-selling. Because people find it hard to get good affiliate products, so i generally would contact the gurus of my niche in the forum and offer to sell their own product to my list and in turn, they will get to sell my product to their list. This strategy has been working very well for me. Simply cos it is a win win situation.
Forum marketing absolutely works, if you take the time to do it right. That is to say, don't just create an account and start dumping your links. You have to take the time to become an active member and actually provide value to the community. I'm not saying you have to sit on the forum all day long, but taking 20-30 minutes per day to post genuinely helpful or interesting comments can go a long way. If all of that sounds like too much work, and in many cases I would agree that it might be, you may want to consider contacting the forum owner and asking if they would consider selling you a sponsored thread. Basically, you pay them a fee to have a thread stickied to the top of whatever relevant section of the forum. It depends on your niche, but many forum owners "don't know what they have" and you'll be surprised at how cheap you can get a sponsored thread. Note that combining these methods (forum posting + sponsored thread) can have pretty great results as well. By the time you post the sponsored thread, people know you, they know you're a quality member, etc., thus they're more likely to give your advertisement more than just a cursory glance. Anyway, just some food for thought based on my experiences.
Forum marketing definitely works. I get optins (and more) from forums every day. Today infact I got a few optins. (Not sure WHICH forum it came from unfortunately, but that's only because I'm a lazy split-tester). PS: The key to making it work, is by being helpful and providing value to any forum that you visit. In the event that you only offer low quality tripe, nobody will ever visit your links.
Tsk, tsk! Split testing can be a pain in the butt, but it definitely pays off. What if you found that all of those optins were coming from one forum alone? Then you'd know that's the one you should put a little extra focus on. Yes! That's exactly what I was saying.
The best tip I have found is to use aged accounts. If you start posting links to affiliate sites on day 1 you will usually get banned but if you have contributed info for a month or two you can slip your affiliate sites into your post naturally.