In terms of Affiliate Marketing, do internet forums do well in attracting traffic?

Question

Or would another type of site be more profitable?

Answer 1

NO -- because:

1 - many forum owners and administrators don't like people spamming their forum and putting in links; or merely using their forum to advertise their affiliate programs

2 - you can get traffic, but not a lot of traffic. You will have to spam a lot of forums with your affiliate links to be able to get a sizeable traffic

Getting traffic should be a multi-pronged approach, and not just using 1 strategy. Examples include

Send out press releases. While outfits charge as much as $650 per release, there are free press release submission places on the Web. Press releases allow you to (a) attract media attention; (b) get more back links to your website without sending each website an email request; and (c) get more visibility especially if your press release gets in Google News or Yahoo News.

http://www.prleap.com/sign_up.html
http://i-newswire.com/
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
http://www.pressbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi
http://www.pr.com/press-releases
http://www.prfree.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml
http://www.theopenpress.com/
http://www.przoom.com/
http://www.prweb.com
http://www.newswiretoday.com/
http://www.free-press-release.com/

Submit articles. Write articles and submit them to websites accepting author submissions. You get exposure for your business; establishes you as an authority in your field, and allows you to get backlinks for your website. If 50 websites publish your article and it contains a link back to your website, then you easily get 50 links from a single article. The more links you have, the greater your chances for increasing your search engine rankings.

Here is a comprehensive list of where to submit your articles http://answers.yahoo.com/question/;_ylt=AhzreGmnCUicOoyedqypscUjzKIX?qid=1006022407481

Answer 2

Good forums like whydowork.com work very well for attracting traffic, as long as you treat them the right way. There's no point going in and spamming your affiliate links all over the place because the members will just ignore you and the mods will delete your posts!

Best to take it one step at a time and introduce yourself, read some posts and get to know who the regular posters are, then ask a few relevant questions and get yourself known. All the while, you can have your link to your site or affiliate op in your signature. That displays every time you post.

As long as your posts are reasonable quality (not simple one-liners like "Yes, I agree with you..." etc you start to gain respect and the members will click the links in your sig out of curiosity.

It takes time and a bit of effort on your part, but when you do it right, forums are an extremely powerful way of building traffic to your site, because once you have the respect of the hundreds or even thousands of members, you're looking at a ton of potential visitors and recommenders to your site!

There is an extra bonus from making lots of good quality, original posts as well. The search engines take notice of good content and if you have a link to your own website or blog in your sig, you get valuable one-way back-links to your site, which count towards you getting a good page rank.

Hope that helps,

Terry Didcott
http://www.thehonestway.com/blog

Answer 3

I think forums would only work if you became a 'presence' on them, for example, if you were identified for something special , so that when you're screen name appeared in a post, it would be recognizable by a group of 'fans'

Answer 4

Hi there,
Here you can find a good resource that teaches how to make money online with internet marketing: http://www.goobypls.com/r/rd.asp?gid=548

I started using it with very good results.
Best

Answer 5

Virally market your affiliate link:

http://www.sitestartups.com/?p=84