LOl i agree. if you giving somethign free, people will come to you. Better way is giving out useful information will be even better. that's why content is the most important thing for every website.
On the other hand, sites like DigitalPoint are more likely to direct users who have Compete.com and Alexa.com toolbars installed, as well as being more likely to use social bookmarking services. Traffic from techie sites has a very valuable place.
One needs to be active on the forums and also have a good reputation, as you've already mentioned in your post
Nice post pal. Thanks for freely sharing your success with us. Wish you more traffic (and $dollars) Yours, Muhammad.
This type of SEO activity is a waste of time. Organic traffic is the king, but all traffic is nothing if it doesn't convert. Forum traffic never convert because webmasters as the most selfish type of users : they make sure they don't click on any ad or improve web sites. What I need is employers, job seekers, etc - not webmasters If there is a webmaster in my web site - he must be looking how to do something . Most of users who built their resumes using the online resume builder in my web site , so far, are job board owners - not job seekers In fact I believe it's not wise to leave signatures in forums- any forum.
And, speaking of something free: at www.ounce-of-gold.com you can win an ounce of gold every month as long as the contest runs. That's the free stuff, the not so free is that an earlier post of mine here seems to have generated about a quarter of my traffic. And, at a 25% conversion rate I am thinking this is not at all a bad thing.
I don't think its completely useless, for instance alot of people into web design like anime so theres gonna be a "little" targeted traffic.