I Love Spam!

[lisa]

OK, I don't really love spam, but when you title a post "Forum Rules" people don't read them. Gotcha!

As this forum grows the potential of spammy posts will increase and in extreme cases, I will ban IP addresses if need be.

As I mentioned in another thread, what many of you don't realize is that people can tell if you are here to help or if you simply posting to self promote. If you are here to self promote, there's actually LESS of a chance people will click on your links (or sig file) because people know it's spam. Spammers never seem to realize this.

If you really want people to build traffic to your site via your sig file and get the most out of any forum, here's how...

1) Post regularly BUT post topics of substance. Posting random information or just posting for the sake of increasing your post count does nothing for your credibility. People ignore you.

I would much rather have someone post one good post, once a week than someone who posts 20 useless posts in a day. Quality is much more important than quantity.

2) Help people. This is probably the most important one. Helping people builds your credibility. As users browse the forum they can quickly see who is offering the great advice. As you build up your forum reputation and number of good posts, the chances of people clicking your sig file actually increase.

3) Put your top level domain (www.yoursite.com) in your sig file rather than an affiliate link or an internal page. This forum is now SEO friendly (static URLs) so the spiders will pick up your link and they give more weight to home pages.

I've actually made sales because of forum posting but not by spamming. I build up my reputation by helping people and simply provide a link to my home page site in my sig file. Believe it or not that's a MUCH more effective way of getting traffic than just posting spam.

There are no shortcuts to success and it applies to website building, bloggin and even forum posting. While posting spam in a forum is quick and easy, it is completely worthless. Notice you never hear a successful Internet entrepreneur say their best promotion method is forum spam. There's a reason for that. It doesn't work!

What Do I Consider Spam?

1) Recommending a product/service by using your affiliate link. If you want to recommend a site, use the top level domain (site.com) only.

2) Editing your sig file to reflect the thread topic. For example, if the topic is about Amazon.com and you change your sig file to your Amazon.com affiliate link to subtly draw attention to it.

3) Posting with the sole purpose of promoting your site or affiliate link.

Thanks for helping me keep the forum clean!