What the Hell Signiture for?

Do you have any forums that you drop by frequently?

If so, what is the main motivation that keeps you spending most of your time hanging around the forums?

Is it because you have some internet friends in the forum, or maybe you need helps for your marketing problems or simply you just want to chat with people and be recognized as an authority in certain topics?

To me, keeping up with huge amount of posts and contents each day would be a total waste of my time, especially if it doesn’t benefit me in any way towards my business… somehow that’s what I used to think.

Until recently I signed up for a newsletter authored by the “Queen of Forums, Cindy Battye. She ultimately reverse the views I have in participating the forums, she also teaches me how to utilize it and turn it into one of my powerful marketing weapon.

Today I’ll like to share with you one of the most useful tips that I’ve learn from her on how to make use of the forum signatures to their full extent.

Most people only use their signatures in an attempt to spam the forum. This not only waste their time and effort when someone clicks on your signature link and only to find out what you offer are usually not related to what they are looking for, but also a great impact on your reputation as they will try to avoid clicking your links in the future.

So the correct way to leave your forum signatures is to consider these 4 important factors when you edit your signature:

1. PROMOTION - The signature link acts just like roadside advertising, especially if it is done such a way it doesn’t annoy anyone. In other words, no animated smileys. The repetition of the link and the helpful information above your signature are an effective and long lasting way to promote your company and your product.

2. TRAFFIC - In addition to the promotion which you get from adding your business web link to your signature, you get the traffic from the people who see the site promoted and follow through by clicking on the link. A link that appears regularly on a large and trusted forum is often seen as being more trustworthy. Because the link is visible and the messages are never harsh or divisive, there is already a level of confidence build in the website by itself.

3. BACKLINKS - Each time you post at a forum, you are not only promoting your web page directly and adding to the traffic coming to your website, you’re also growing the numbers of your backlinks on your own website. When the search engine spider crawls the forum, your link is counted as a backlink, which provides you with many backlinks within a very short period of time.

4. PAGE RANKING - Increasing the numbers of backlinks can assist in increasing your page rank. Page ranking is Google’s measure of importance that they put they stamp on your site, and will affect how high up the page of your website will appear if a person types your keywords into the search engine. You can easily increase your page rank without the need of purchasing any links.

All you need to do is include your web site link within your signature. Although not instantaneous, your signature-based link will soon give you an increased page ranking. Set your signature up correctly. For the best result, use keywords that you want to be found for when people are searching in Google.

Do you still think that spending some time hanging around inside the forums are a waste of time?

Well, at least not for me anymore…

Of course, to fully utilize a forum site will not only consist of adding your your signatures, there’s more to it. But your main concern when making a post to which ever forum you’re in is to understand their rules and regulation, and to provide genuinely useful contents when starting or replying to certain topics.