Selling Forum Sugnatures?

sigsense.com that's a nice site for sure

 

LOL, 'nice' and 'successful' are 2 entirely different things. The site has no alexa ranking, and no pagerank, yet it has been online since 2005. What does that tell you?

 

Poor Marketing ?

 

I agree that it would be difficult to police. There are probably people selling their advertising space in their sigs now without you even aware of it.

I personally don't mind people selling their sig links in my forum as it gives them credit back for their posts. But I would not want posts written in the forum just to increase their post count. I would still want quality posts.

 

I don't think people would start posting more. As it wouldn't increase the current bidding price of their signature. Plus when users are new to a forum their signature won't sell anyways so before they can even sell their signature in most cases they would be banned as a spammer already. In the end the only signatures that will sell well are the users/members that have lots of posts and are currently great users/members in communities already.

 

It could definitely help boost your traffic.

 

I just give mine away as they are crap for SEO. The one on the left i dont even know who owns the site lol

 

Hi,

There are the Pros and Cons with this topic, as with most.

allowing and encouraging users to sell signature links will, undoubtably, lead to people posting more, in order to get their post count up so that they can sell their signature links at a greater price.

These posts, however, will generally be of a lower quality than if they werent competing to get their numbers up. Members will be posting just for the sake of posting, and this leads to a forum full of spam that nobody will want to join.

But wait, what about Digital Point? Here you are allowed to sell your signature links, and yes, you do find lots of people just posting for the sake of getting their post count up, however, DP has a team of very good moderators in place who deal with spam posts very well.


Conclusion :

I think that allowing people to sell signature links on forums is a good thing to do, but only when you forum is very large, because you will have a moderating team able to handle it, or very small, because it will attract posting and give your forum an extra boost.

 

On this topic - I've actually had a development site aimed at very controlled earnings through signatures. The development so far is not aimed at merely selling the signatures, it is aimed at producing a "clean" PayPerClick model, with a few differences.

I'm looking for around 3-5 volunteers, who own a small / medium sized vBulletin forum, and would be willing to trial the technology. This means being willing to install a plugin I've created to interface with the central tracking system, and after some initial testing, if you approve of how everything works, asking a few members if they want to trial the use of paid signatures.

Before anyone says "spam, click fraud, impossible to police" - that isn't helpful to me. I'm looking for constructive individuals who are ready to help improve a system that I have implemented to minimise all of the above. The plugin will help stop spam occurring, and will act as a tool to make sure forum owners get commission on clicks coming from their forum.

If interested, please PM me, or see my blog post on the subject for more information.

Again, I'm looking for no more than 5 small vBulletin forum owners to trial the system. No cost on your part of course.

 

See DP as a good exemple

 

I think it's ok if it's only links. But do people click on sigs anymore? Maybe a small handful but they are mostly ignored.

 

I've always found signature links to be pretty effective. Not huge amounts of traffic, but I suppose it will depend on a number of factors. How often you post, type of sig link, anchor text you display, reputation of the poster etc.

 

I don't think I have ever clicked one LoL, and some forums allow you to turn them off and I often do (turn them off) - but in saying that I would buy some if they were cheap and I am willing to give it a shot.

 

Depends on the person for sure. I can count the number of adsense ads I've ever clicked on with 1 hand, but I hear they are doing pretty well even without me.

 

I must say all the traffic generated so far at sigsell is 100% from my signature. I don't do any other advertising and I'm getting pretty decent traffic from it all. So in the end I think it's a great idea but I would like to see more buyers we seems to have tons of sellers. (just in general)

 

To answer your question

I own a rather large forum and allow sig links as my members love to have them, if I put no follow or disabled them all together 95% of my users would prolly leave.

 

HAHA1 it's kinda funny you say this because I'm at this one forums where they only allow 2 links. I almost left today because of this but then I thought I should stay 2 is better than none Plus I need the advertising so I post there only in hopes that someone clicks my signature links

 

Well my forums allow 3 links and your welcome to join and do the same (sig links to find them)

 

I'm there now it's a nice site I will help you make it grow! I will post daily and help you get a little active, cheers