Online forums are now a common feature on the Internet. Some websites have even broken the traditional definitions of a website and feature only forum, where the main index page is a list of forums and active discussions. These websites offer content not in the traditional form of static webpages but dynamic user submitted posts and content. With an active community continuously contributing to the content of the website, the website develops into popular place for the latest news and acts as a grapevine for forum members.

In addition to participating on forums and gaining new knowledge from other members, forums are an excellent place to promote your websites. This is done through the forum signatures that most forums will allow each member to have. These forum signatures are automatically attached into the post made by the member. Forum signatures have traditionally been used in mails and then in electronic mails and then in bulletin-board/newsgroups discussions. It is no surprise that the signature system also progressed into the online forum and is widely supported by popular forum software such as VBulletin, phpbb, Invisionboard, etc.

Your forum signature can be a useful tool to do a bit of advertising for your website and products. Most forums will have some regulations on forum signature lengths or forum signature formatting. Common forum signature formats that are approved by mature forums are text-only forum signatures and specifying a maximum of number of lines in the forum signature. Always abide by the forum rules and especially in the forum signature rules as many forums are particular about members not joining their forums for the specific purpose of spamming their links through their forum signatures or posts.

So, as a contributing member to the forum discussions, you have the priviledges of including your forum signature in your posts. How do you ensure that your forum signature is read and not ignored like the tens of forum signatures of the other members who have posted in the same discussion? How do you use your forum signature for maximum benefit?

Here are some tips for optimizing forum sigatures:

1. Do not post more than 3 links. Anything more than that is certaintly viewed as spam and most people will ignore your forum signature.

2. Do not post something like: " http://www.buildtolearn.com - Webmaster community ". Instead, if possible, post your link with "anchor text". The word webmaster community should be the link enclosed by the < a href > tags. This would benefit your link in SEO.

3. Include more than just a link. Be more descriptive around your forum signature and links. For example, use something like "Over 10,000 members in the best webmaster community" (with link from the keyword 'webmaster community'). Or something to entice the viewer to click through to your website, eg. "Submit articles to our article library and stand to win $100".

4. Use at most 3 colors in your forum signature. It is a good idea to highlight the keyword/link with color such as blue or red. Leave the rest of the text in black.

It takes some experimenting to find the best forum signature format for each forum. With these 4 tips in mind, your chances of improving click-through rates from your forum signature will increase tremendously.

About the author: Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community at http://www.Buildtolearn.com a forum community that discusses web-hosting and webmaster related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many others.

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The tens of thousands of internet “forums” that attract users who have common interests have recently become of interest to marketers – particularly niche marketers. There are forums for every imaginable topic. To see an example of the specialized nature of forums, look at www.big-boards.com. To be sure they represent a potent marketing opportunity and medium. But they can also be a negative force in marketing if used incorrectly. So before you invest in forum marketing make sure you understand the milieu.

An internet forum is a discussion room that operates via the internet. In a sense, they are an evolution of the newsgroups and email bulletin boards that were so prevalent ten to fifteen years ago. Topics get put on the collective forum table and discussion ensues via “posts” to the forum – essential via messages that get posted for everyone to see. Today, you can also consider chat rooms and interactive blogs as a style of forum.

There are two general styles of forum: moderated and unmoderated. Most long-lasting forums are moderated. That is, that all posts are reviewed by a “moderator” before being made public. In this way, the forum protects itself from undesirable spam, crazy people, and profane, obscene, or off-topic material. Unmoderate forums are just that, unmoderated.

Most forums have rules that govern the content that is acceptable to the forum. Violating these rules will draw the contempt of the entire forum. There is no better way to shoot yourself in the foot than to have your forum marketing efforts earn the disdain of the entire forum membership! In newsgroup days, this was called “flaming” (as in ‘shot down in flames’).

On the other hand, if used carefully, forum marketing can be a great way to boost website traffic. Many forums while banning overt advertising or self-serving posts, do not mind a little appropriate discussion or referencing of products, services or features. Many forums also do allow the author to include a link to their own site.

To make sure you don’t run afoul of forum policy be sure to check out their rules, avoid overt selling (forum members are very sensitive to even subtle selling), and make sure that your posts offer good reasons to refer to off-forum content in your site.

About the author: Sean Ray, Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘
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Web traffic is critical to your online success. Without web traffic you will flounder and die online. With web traffic you have a chance. Even with web traffic you must consistently test and track everything that you do and drop the losers and bump up the effort on the winners.

To achieve the highest levels of web traffic, you must be willing to take massive action. Massive action is the action of taking action to the fullest level, willing yourself to take 10x the action any other normal marketer would take. Do you want to be normal, to be average? If so, you might as well go back to the TV and pick up a bag of potato chips. You see, the average person online FAILS!

You must become above average or die online.

So, how to generate massive traffic with forums?

1) Find 20 forums in your online niche. For example, if you sell car parts online, type in “car parts forums” into your favorite search engine.

2) Join all 20 forums

3) Create a signature file that has your name and email or URL. Do not put a sales message--just your info.

4) Go into the introductions section of the forum and introduce yourself. Just your name, where you are from, your hobbies, and that you are into car parts. Log off.

5) The following day, begin to surf the forum, looking for questions that have been asked to which you know the answers. Give the answers. Do not try to sell anything of your own. Answer 5 questions in each forum. Log off.

6) Continue to answer 5 questions per day in each forum.

To achieve massive results, you must take massive action. You will not get many hits and probably no sales the first few weeks of posting to forums. You see, it is not like typical direct response advertising, where you have your ad posted and you get clicks and sales. This is different. This is about relationship. You must create a relationship with the people in the forum, and they must begin to see you as the answer man. Then they will buy from you. You see, they do not buy from the

To download my new book, ‘15 Steps to Internet Success‘, click here: Internet Marketing Success

Are you interested in learning how to build a responsive mailing list? Click here: List Building

About the author:Sean Mize is an online author and internet marketer, and produces internet marketing training materials.

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Spam in forum boards consists mainly in two activities, that are the following ones:

• Spam Threads
• Spam Member Profiles

Spam threads are new topics in which spammers put lots of links, usually pharmacy drugs and sex related, in order to obtain links for their websites and gain some traffic from the search engines.

This activity, apart of being illegal, it is totally deprecated because it promotes website that may potentially sell dangerous products, scams or could even bring to phishing sites.

Moreover, letting those links stay alive on your forum board may let your pages on being penalized, if such links are categorized as “bad neighbours” from the engines.

Last but not least, users seeing too much trash on your pages won’t return on your site anymore, and you will progressively lose traffic along with having your content quality drop to nothing.

For such reasons spam prevention is essential in order to keep your forum board tidy. Therefore the main question is: how can you achieve the goal of preventing spammers infest your forum board?

First of all, you will need to moderate your board by yourself or having some dedicated moderators in order to delete spam threads when these appear. If you are using PhpBB you should find a hack to add a thread report feature so to make your regular users help you in the spam prevention task.

Also, if you want to avoid people to sign up just to put their spam website on their profile to be shown, you should activate the email confirmation on your forum script. Both PhpBB and vBulletin are supporting this feature.

Manual activation of the accounts from the forum admin may be an idea, but this would slow down new memberships and could be an unsustainable extra work from your side.

You could even remove the possibility to add a website on your members’ profiles but this could limit your legit users, and you want your community to have all the benefits you can give them.

A good solution may be to remove the live links from profiles and the member list, and this can be easily done with manual modification of your forum script. It is easily feasible on PhpBB and vBulletin as well.

If you don’t know how to do this, you can contact a professional forum promotion firm and make them do the job for you. For instance, my company is doing such jobs for the public.

About the author: Alessandro Golkar is the founder and CEO of ForumBoosting, the forum promotion and enhancement firm that established its operations in November 2005. They are helping forum owners to kickstart their board and revive old ones, putting fresh content on them, and making a proper search engine optimization on their pages. Paid forum posting is the main business, along with forum seo.

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Great Members – without members you have no forum
Good Content – without good content you will get no members
Courteous Staff – without courteous staff you will lose members

What makes great forum staff?

1. Share Knowledge
2. Expand on Content
3. Be willing to help others
4. Making other members feel welcome
5. Join in on conversations
6. Ask quality questions
7. Give quality answers
8. Start good conversations

What makes a good member?

A good member adds to the content of the forum. Regards of how little you think you know even if you only know a few basic things; it may be more than someone else knows. You should share your knowledge regardless of how little you feel it is. Sharing knowledge and experience is how we all learn.

1. Share Knowledge
2. Expand on Content
3. Willing to help others
4. Making other members feel welcome
5. Join in on conversations
6. Ask relevant questions
7. Give relevant answers

We all learn from questions asked and answered regardless of how trivial it may seem to you, it may be of great help to others. Not everyone will have the same amount of experience and knowledge as you. When you ask as question it does not have to be a long drawn out question. Short and too the point is acceptable.

When you answer a question, please try to give as much information as you can without sending them to an outside source for an explanation. Do however give them an outside source if you feel they can benefit from it as much as they can from your answer.

If someone has helped you on the forum, say thank you for the help, you could expand it more by stating how that member has helped you. A little praise and encouragement can go a long way toward making a great member.

About the author:Mary B. Brown http://www.rebelrosenetworks.com

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New forums are popping up around the net all the time, adding to the thousands of forums on out there already. Many of them will never make it past a few months; some of them become pillars of the ever growing internet community. What makes the difference you ask? The following concepts will explore why some forums become successful and how to turn the success into cash.

Forums are a place for people to exchange ideas. There are two key elements in that simple sentence, people and ideas. You need people in your forum and you need them to be talking about things that matter, things that will get others to join in the fun. This gets you to the first problem, getting people and getting them to talk. People don’t like to join empty forums so you will need to get a few friends together and start posting topic others would be interested in talking about. When your forum is small, you really need to target a niche and get a good core group of regularly posting members. With many huge forums out there you are not likely to succeed with a broad forum. You can always expand later when your users ask you to. Start small with quality content, or if you already have a forum scale it down and find a target group.

If you are good with code or graphically inclined, you should spend some time customizing the forum so people feel like they are part of something special. You need to invest some time into making your forum look professional and inviting to people in your target niche. If you already have a forum maybe it is time for a makeover. Our visual sense is our strongest sense so a redesign will make a big difference.

Traffic, traffic, and more traffic. Every website needs traffic and everybody talks about how to get traffic so we won’t dwell on it too much. We will look at how to make that traffic into cash instead. Now that you have a core group of users and your forum is looking all pretty, let’s see if we can squeeze some ads in there. Affiliate banners such as Adsense probably won’t make you money unless you have massive amounts of traffic so you are better off finding your own sponsors. Since you are targeting a specific niche of people you will have an easier time to find individual sponsors. You can use something like Adbrite where individual sponsors will sign up for your site, commission junction where you can lick niche specific sponsors, or you can implement a custom php solution, what ever you think might work best.

An even better way to make money is if you can directly sell services or products to your members. For example a forum talking about web hosts can offer web hosting directly, a forum talking about travel can offer downloadable wall papers and so on. Also a great idea is to have something like a gift shop where people can order T-shirts, coffee mugs and so on with the forum logo on it. You could also look into maybe a good drop-shipping retailer deal for arts and crafts related forums. The possibilities are so broad that we will discuss it in the next article.

For now the you have lots of work to do, target your forum at a specific niche, get a core group together and start producing some valuable content. If start seeing increase in your traffic you can start looking for advertisers or establish services for sale or get a product line together.

About the Author: George Papp is the Webmaster of http://www.websiteauctionhub.com A great place to get advice on improving your forum!

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