Well I should be sleeping now or so my body says, but my brain is in “share knowledge” mode. You need to be in the writing mood to blog at your best!

I’d like to go over a very effective marketing technique, forum marketing. I’ll introduce it briefly, but the meat of this post will be in describing my many techniques in choosing the right forum to post in, the tone to “speak” in and a few other little tidbits.

When I speak of forum marketing, I’m talking about the act of getting your link up on forums. That’s vague enough!

You’re going to want your link on forums to get some extra visitors to your website and so that you can add to your backlinks. A backlink is “site A” linking to “site B” where “site B” is yours. You can then say “site A” backlinks to “site B”. Backlinks can help you get listed on search engines and if done effectively can greatly increase your position on them.

Here’s what I do for effective backlinks. I focus on my main keywords for my site. Let’s say “affiliate marketing”. I then Google or Scour (I’ll write about Scour some other time) those keywords, maybe add ” forum” to it, and look at the results. I’ll check out all the forums in the results and find a topic that I feel I can reply to with some helpful information. (This is important! If your post sounds like a sales-pitch it’s as effective as a turtle sprinting!). Try to lead someone to your link, where the link would be helpful to them or relevant to their case/issue.

Add a personal touch to your message. Here’s two examples of someone trying to link their Costume store on a forum that had a topic created by someone who needed a Halloween outfit.

Ex. 1) For some great prices and costumes check out “link to store”.
Ex. 2) I’ve been looking around for a costume too and found a great selection over at “store link here”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, example 2 is much more effective because it has a more personal touch and feels like it’s coming from an equal not from someone who is desperate for a sale.

So follow the above and here’s what you’ll have:

• a link to your site coming from a relevant forum
• the gratitude from the person you helped out or informed in the forum
• credibility in the eyes of the readers
• higher sale or interest potential
• search engine love! They like when a link to your “halloween store” is coming from a “halloween topic”. Even better if it was coming from a Halloween site, but that can’t always be achieved. You must make due with what you can get.

So go out there already and start getting linked up! What!… still reading? Go!

As always if you have any questions please leave a comment. It’s way too quiet in here. Cause a stir!

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Part of affiliate marketing is knowing who your users are. If you own a website or a blog or any content online I bet you’d want to know who’s viewing it, from where, when, with what browser, and on what platform.

There’s an easy and FREE way to getting that information, and that is by using Google Analytics. Google analytics gives you detailed statistics of the users browsing your site and reports that information with graphs, charts, detailed lists and awesome stats. There’s so much you can do with Google Analytics that there are tons of books written to try and expose all its functionality. Once again this is all free. It’s the best free tool around and is a must for any website or blog owner. You can sign up here. It is a free tool, it will never cost you a penny. Use it!

Here’s a few good tips once you start getting used to the tool, 8 Stupid Things Webmasters do to Mess Up Their Analytics.

If you have any questions on signing up or using analytics leave a comment and I’ll help you out.

Hello fellow affiliates!

So I’ve come across a really interesting read in a very suprising format; a free eBook written by Harvey Segal, a big name in the industry. I always thought of those free eBooks and “find the secret to online success for 97$” eBooks as pure SCAMS that offer nothing more than childs play information. I was surprised how well it caught my attention, and as a seasoned affiliate marketer I was also happy to see some good techniques that I’ve used before as well as adding some great ideas to my marketing artillery. And I say this only to point out that not one source has all the marketing strategies. There’s always different, creative ways to market a product or service and keeping an open mind will equip you well when trying to find a solution to reaching your objective.

Here’s a few good points that are covered in the eBook:

• A few methods to generating traffic to your product or service/referral signup (or someone elses)
• Preselling your product or service or referral signup
• Autoresponders and follow up campaigns
• ClickBank and how it can work for you
• Viral marketing
• Creating niche sites
• Resale rights

Check out the full affiliate marketing free eBook.