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

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