Hello, I know one of the most popular free methods of advertising is sigs on forums like these. Does anyone have advice on or know of any products that help become more effective when trying to post to forums? Has to be a better way than leaving a bunch of post with your product in the signature.
The one tip I can give you is to make every post count. That means no "me too" posts. The number of posts is not as important as building a reputation for reliable information. If you have a chance to write the best reply in a thread, do it. This type of post will get you a lot of clickthroughs on the signature because the reader is curious to find out more about the writer. It's the old saw about content being king. In this case the content is the post itself. BTW, spelling and grammar do count! .
The best approach is to make valuable and informative posts, and build up a trust within the community. Keep you signature neat and tidy, with the links you want to market. If someone posts a thread about a particular subject that your product is related to, then you can quietly mention it in context. Passive advertising in signatures does have a benefit on its own, both in terms traffic and in search engine rankings. Cryo.
Comes back to content is king! Thanks for your thoughts. I've been trying to avoid the "me too" postings in the boards I visit. I want to go after adult webhosting market. But on those boards 90% of the post have nothing to do with anything unlike DP and some others out there. I have been brainstorming on some thread topics to start speaking about hosting without it looking like me spamming. Kind of tough.
I think it is as others have indicated. Build a reputation on a forum and referrals etc follow. It's not an overnight thing but a high traffic forum can be worth its weight in gold. Good luck, Mike.
It's quite simple to advertise with your forum sig. Help people out, contribute useful information to discussions...stuff like that will cause the people who frequent the forum to trust you enough to check out your site.
Be very aware of the tos of any particular forum. Some forums are very strict, to the point where your sig will be hand edited out of a post if a particular moderator is displeased with you. It has not happened here, but it has happened. .
I have had that with putting my sites link in my sig on some of the same topic forums as my site. For example, I have included my games site on game related forums and because they also have games on their forums / site they then delete my link and say you can't promote game related sites on your sigs.