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



There’s one resource for small business ideas that I want to bring to your attention. While I was away on a hunting trip, I had the pleasure of receiving an email from









