Are Forums Really Good For Search Engine Marketing?

By: Billy Middleton
Submitted: 2007-01-17 13:20:38
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In a bid to make money, many website owners resort to frantic posts in forum pages but you have to wonder if all the man hours are worthwhile.

The theory is relatively simple, post an attractive message on a forum related to your website, include a signature with each post and you attain links to your site/affiliate program and in the process this information is made directly available to anyone viewing that particular topic.

There are however several problems with this technique which when stated may seem rather obvious but in practice most overlook. For example, using the term 'make money forum' one might search Google/MSN etc. for places to post their can't miss opportunity. Now, posting one message regardless of how well worded on one forum page, is literally like throwing a pebble in a small bay somewhere in New Zea-land and expecting an imminent tidal wave to strike New York. It simply won't do very much and if you don't believe me, try it.

No, you will need to post hundreds or thousands of messages on scores of forums. But who will your messages be viewed by? The chances are not anyone interested in what you have to offer, but rather thousands of other people offering the same or similar promotions. Are these really the people who want to part with their hard earned cash in favour of your venture? I think not. These are people who want to make money from you not give it to you!

So the direct market value is virtually worthless but what of your search engine popularity? Well, you've placed hundreds of links on thousands of pages related to your site. That would normally be a good thing. However in this instance it isn't necessarily the case. That is to say not regarding your competitors who will probably benefit more. What I mean is, to gauge how well your post has done, you will check how many replies there are and how many page views. Mostly the number of replies will be close to the number of views and who are they from? YOUR COMPETITORS, each with a signature linking to their own deal or affiliate program, so you are practically no further ahead.

Thus far the approach is starting to seem less lucrative I think you will agree. If you've spent hundreds of hours arguing your case in various forums, frantically trying to achieve success you may want to look away now. You may well have actually dropped a few places on search engines for your area, simply because you have now created more content rich pages on some other website that is viewed often by people trying to make money. Google knows it, MSN knows it and I suspect the people that place the forum on their site using valuable storage space and bandwidth know it too. Their add promotions very lucrative, their popularity huge. All because thousands of web users effectively write bait laden correspondences on their pages.

I wish you well with any marketing technique you wish to try, but sincerely hope that you don't put all your eggs in the forum frenzied basket.

Personally, I think the major search engines should discount links from forum pages. Not only that but, unless the word forum is specifically mentioned in the query field, no forum should be returned in the results. That way if you want to "make money" you might find pages that offer ways of doing so rather than results littered with posts by promoters sending links with no real details concerning the offer they make.

Billy Middleton is the creator of the new poundpyramid where you earn a FIXED return of ?25000 per share.

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