Instant Traffic Sources Part I: Forums

One of the recurring themes here is the good, slow, and steady approach: write good content, write something every day, and good traffic will inevitably follow. That honestly and truly is all you need to do to make money in the world of affiliate marketing, as long as you’re consistent, and do it over and over and over.

But it’s definitely hard, especially with newer sites that aren’t fully indexed in search engines, as we’re hard-wired to want to see results from our hard work, and we want to see them now, not in weeks later and especially not a couple of months from now. ‘Tis a perfectly natural reaction, and I’m still prone to it myself. The natural question, then, is whether or not there are things you can do to generate traffic to your websites now, while waiting for your good, juicy content to get indexed in search engines.

Happily, the answer is yes. But I’ll immediately qualify it, before touching on a few ways to generate traffic. Like anything affiliate related, always consider the time premium. You’ve only got so much time to spend on your site. Be ruthless about how you spend it. Always ask yourself if you’re better off creating more content, as that should be your primary goal. Always. Good content will always trump any other technique or activity. Always.

So how do we generate traffic to a brand new website? Well, our first consideration should be to narrow that down, and ask how we can generate good, focused content to our sites. You could stand on a street corner and shout “Visit my site bluewidgets.com!” at every passerby, for ten hours a day, and that would actually create some traffic, as some people would be curious later when they got home and type in the URL, to see what that idiot on the street corner was shouting about.

But that’s pretty crappy traffic, as you didn’t pre-qualify them at all, and have no idea if they’re interested in blue widgets at all. It’s also not an efficient use of your time, as the handful of curious people that check out your site simply isn’t worth the ten hours you spent shouting on the street corner.

So we not only want to generate traffic, but we want to pre-qualify it, so that the visitors are more inclined than the average surfer to respond to the content on our site. Got all that? Okay, now let’s dive into the first of several ways to generate traffic to our new website.
Generating Traffic from Forums

One of the best ways to generate traffic to a new site is to find forum sites that are related to the topic of your site. In this day and age, pretty much any popular topic you tackle for an affiliate site will have existing forums out there, where people are discussing and debating various related topics. Just do a Google search on “blue widget forums” to find them, or something similar.

Most forums allow you to include a signature line with a URL in it. Check to make sure that the forum you found allows that, as it’s pretty crucial. If they do, you’re in luck. Register for the forum and simply wade into discussions, and create a signature line that has the URL of your website in it. Be sure, too, to put your signature URL to good use. This means varying your link phrase to reinforce important keywords on your site, and not always using the same default signature line.
If your site is about blue widgets, a natural link in your signature line would be “Blue Widgets”, with the entire phrase linked to your website. Set that up and post a good bit using it. If your website is for people looking to buy blue widgets online, another good link phrase would be “Blue Widgets Online”, with that linked to your site. Post for awhile with that, then switch it to “Buy Blue Widgets”. Mix it up, as variety in incoming links to your site will help you more in search engine results than all of the links being exactly the same.
Don’t be blatant about plugging your site and avoid the temptation to take short-cuts like just saying “I agree with JoeBob.” and nothing more. To get the maximum impact you need to build up a certain amount of trust factor, so that it appears that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Other visitors to the forum are much more likely to click through your signature URL on your posts if you appear to be an expert than if you’re an idiot or obvious just trolling for clicks.

Forum posts won’t generate tons of traffic but it’s generally fairly targeted, and most posts don’t expire, so the links will continue to work for you long after the post has been made. Not all forums are created equal, too, so it takes some experimenting to find ones that work well for your site. If you’re spending a lot of time on posting and seeing very few clicks, then it might be time to reassess, as far as whether or not you’re spending your time wisely.

I’ll continue this thread tomorrow, with more examples of good traffic sources for new sites.

Instant Traffic Sources Part I: Forums and related information can be found in Getting Started, Traffic generation