The Honest Way

I shouldn’t need to go into too much detail about what forum signatures are - they are simply a place where you can write your name and add a link and they are displayed at the bottom of all your forum posts. This is different from posting links in your actual forum posts, which is taken a dim view of and could get you outright banned an most of the better forums.So forum “sigs” are the place to promote yourself.

There is more to it than simply that. Of course, your posts should be as interesting as possible, because you will want the members of that forum to read your posts in order that you will gain their respect. Then there is every chance they will click on your links out of curiosity.

But the whole point of this short article is a greater use for those signature links. At least for the owners of websites and blogs (which, let’s face it is just about all of us).

I’ve seen it in countless forums, new members join, try their best to write decent posts and as often as possible but they let themselves down by doing something which I think is pointless.

They use up all their allocated signature space by placing a bunch of affiliate links.

Why is that bad?

Because they are missing out on a golden opportunity to improve the page rank of their website or blog.

Let me explain. You own a website or blog and naturally want to promote it. On your site you promote your affiliate products to make sales and make money - generating an income from your site. The more popular your website becomes, the more traffic it will get and the more sales it will have the potential to generate. Right?

Right! One way of raising the importance of your website or blog for that matter is by procuring a decent page rank from the search engines. And let’s not beat about the bush here. You want the best page rank you can get from Google. It means everything.

The best way to improve your page rank is to acquire lots of one-way backlinks from high PR sites.

Some of the top forums are high PR sites. To obtain one-way backlinks from forums, guess what you have to do? Write and submit your posts with the link to your website or blog in the signature!

The more posts you make, the more one-way backlinks you generate to your website. That’s if you have a link to your website in your signature.

Has the penny dropped?

Don’t waste the space in your sig with affiliate links (giving the sales page of the vendor all those juicy one-way backlinks). Put your site first. Your affiliate links are already on your site and that’s where you’ll make most sales from! The higher your page rank, the more sales.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

To date, there has still been no word from Clickbank regarding the problem of lost affiliate commissions due to their tracking cookies being blocked by anti-spyware programs running on people’s PC’s.

That means that the problem hasn’t gone away, despite a lot less noise being made about it by affiliate marketers. Maybe some of them are still making so many sales that it doesn’t affect them, but for the average affiliate marketer (like me) it makes a big difference. I know so, because I see my site stats every day and can see that I’m sending x-amount of visitors to the sales pages of products that I promote and I am not seeing the number of sales that those numbers should be converting into.

It’s not just products from Clickbank, either. Products I promote from several different affiliate sources have all continued to underperform so it’s a problem that really needs to be worked out. I get the impression that the affiliate companies themselves are not doing all they can to resolve this by finding a more reliable method of tracking affiliate links when cookies are clearly outdated and failing the affiliate marketers.

If only there were a really clever developer out there that could come up with the solution - imagine the size of the crowd (open cheque-books in hand) beating a path to that person’s door!

In the meantime, we will all just have to promote harder and work off reduced conversion rates to make money at this game. Fun, fun, fun!

One note of good news - for me anyway - and that’s this blog’s Alexa rank has gone up to 116,648.

That’s pretty good going and thanks to all of you for visiting here and reading my ramblings! I’ll keep my end of the bargain by continuing to post interesting and (I like to think) very readable posts. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them for me. I do respond to them all!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

This is some additional info that I wanted to post about the usefulness of Squidoo lenes. When it comes to creating those coveted one-way backlinks to your blog, what better way than to create a lens specific to your blog. Then create some backlinks to it.

There is no need to create a link back to the lens from your blog. Think about it. The more one-way backlinks you can beg, borrow or steal to your blog is of major importance when it comes to begging Google for a decent page rank. Once you have that page rank, your blog becomes that much more valuable to you as a way to make money, primarily from advertising… not to mention the potential increase in traffic from the search engines themselves.

So if you haven’t done it already, go create a lens to compliment your blog. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a lens with the same title as your blog.
2. If you can, make the squidoo link the same as your blog title as well (if the name hasn’t already been taken!
3. Do a really good write-up all about your blog with the link embedded in the text of that article
4. Use anchor text with the title of your blog for maximum weight
5. Add a module to receive an RSS feed from your blog

All these things will help in generating more traffic as well as creating several valuable anchor text-weighted one-way backlinks to your blog.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY