One of my readers prompted me to write about the use of forums in marketing your work from home web site or products/services that you offer. Believe it or not, forums can provide terrific targeted traffic as well as long-term natural search engine traffic.

I’ve always been a fan of forums. They provide an enormous wealth of information that is completely free. You can get any question answered by those more experienced. These two benefits alone are well worth the time of getting involved in forums.

An even bigger benefit that some overlook is the marketing aspect that forum participation can bring. The marketing doesn’t come from your posts, but instead from your forum signature. This aspect, that is built into most if not all forums, is not used to its full potential.

Forum signatures should be designed to grab the attention of other forum members who read your posts. This can be tricky as you usually have limited space to create a signature, but it can be done.

A forum signature usually consists of your favorite links to websites that you want to share with others. These can also be your own websites, and that’s what this post is going to focus on.

Here’s an example of one of my signatures… http://www.warriorforum.com/members/alan-mater.html. Click on the About Me tab and scroll down till you see the Signature section.

Notice how every website or web page contains a phrase that is hyperlinked to go to the corresponding URL. For instance, I have Professional Proofreading Services linked to go to http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/proofreading.html.

The mistake I see many make is that they ignore the keyword aspect of forum signatures and just enter the URL for their website, and sometimes they don’t even have it hyperlinked! That’s fine if you’re focusing on direct traffic from the forum, but you’re missing out on the larger aspect of natural search engine traffic.

Note: Most forums have different signature rules and require specific code in order to create hyperlinked text. Be sure you know what is required when setting up your signature, otherwise it won’t turn out right.

You see, using keywords in your signature links will create backlinks to the web pages those links link to for your given keyword phrase and also boost those pages rankings in the search engines. This will create long-term search traffic, which should be your ultimate goal.

Forum participation is a great way to get your name and business or work from home web site noticed by others. But, you want to get noticed by the right kind of people. What I mean is that you want to pick forums that are related to what your business or web site offers. You want your direct traffic to be as targeted as possible.

The last MUST is providing value when posting in forums. This will ensure you get noticed and bring more clickthroughs of your signature links. Below I’ll provide a list of forums I actively post in that are related to the Internet Marketing and Work From Home niche and get a great deal of traffic from…

Warrior Forum

Conquer Your Niche

Entrepreneur Forums

Work At Home Forum

Alright, now get to work and start getting involved in forums!

I’m a big fan of article marketing, and anyone who knows me will agree. I wouldn’t have created a whole article marketing proof video if I wasn’t 100% positive that it helps build your business for the long term. In fact, here’s my video below…

So what’s this whole Free Traffic System all about? Free Traffic System is the new age of article marketing: it has its advantages and does not have any disadvantages.

The advantages of both article marketing and Free Traffic System are obvious – Google and other search engines welcome and will always welcome the creation of new, useful, non-duplicate content and that is why search engines look favorably upon the backlinks generated this way.

Due to this “benevolent attitude” from search engines towards links built via article marketing, thousands of people have been successfully using article marketing for years to improve their positions in search engines for their targeted keywords.

BUT, unfortunately article marketing has some serious disadvantages – let’s have a look at them:

- when others republish your article they can delete your backlinks from the article

This is a huge problem! And my previous post was exactly about this topic. The owner of GetCashOnline.org decided to use one of my articles on his blog and remove MY links from MY article and insert his own self-serving links. I hate thieves!

After you have submitted your article to one of the major article directories – you lose control over your articles. Today, lots of people are using different automatic tools to “harvest” these directories for content and republish the articles on their sites. Now, probably 95% of the people that republish these articles are honest and will keep your links, but there’s always the other 5%.

The problem is that more and more people are starting to steal your content from article directories and automatically DELETE your backlinks from the resource box. OR, they steal just a tiny portion of your content (1st paragraph of your article, for example) and give a backlink to the article directory. This is great for the article directory, but not for you! This happens quite a lot to me, and I have to be honest… it PISSES me off!

With Free Traffic System you are guaranteed that pages where your content is republished will remain with YOUR backlinks. Those blogs who break this rule and touch your links (modify them/make them invisible/delete them) will be deleted from the Free Traffic System and lose access to quality content.

- duplicate content problems

You see, when one and the same article is republished, Google quickly “understands” this is duplicate content and “sees” that a big portion of your backlinks are built from duplicate content pages. This is not dangerous and Google will not punish you for doing that, but it is rumored that Google seriously lowers the SEO value of backlinks built from duplicate content pages, or just ignores them all together.

The other problem with this is that your duplicate articles will be competing against each other, and most likely Google and other search engines will just choose only one of your articles to show up in search results.

With Free Traffic System you have all the tools necessary to make each of your articles be non-duplicate, even if the article is republished on 20, 40, 100 or even more blogs. With the help of simple procedures – that will take you only an extra 5 minutes per article – you will create dozens or even hundreds of READABLE and CONCISE versions of article titles and bodies that won’t be considered duplicate. It is all in your hands: if you decide to spend 5 minutes and use the diversification tools provided by Free Traffic System, then each of the articles republished will be unique for Google and other search engines. And this will instantly increase the value of your backlinks.

Look at the comparison table to see Free Traffic System compared vs traditional article marketing.

Now I understand there are some tools available that do the same thing for your articles, like Unique Article Wizard. I also believe Submit Your Article will let you spin different versions of your article as well.

BUT… these are quite expensive, ranging from $30 – $70 per month!

Explore these advantages of building one way links with the new level of article marketing for FREE with the Free Traffic System.