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How to harness the power of forums AND use Google to make easy money

Written by: Paul Lock

Article Overview: Forums are one of the things that make the internet a unique medium. A successful online forum leads to customer loyalty, repeat visits and more sales.

How to harness the power of forums AND use Google to make easy money

An online forum is simply a place where people with common interests gather and share ideas, news, views, jokes and so on. It’s a 21st century version of the public meeting with all of the passion, emotion and fervour that such meetings create.

In fact the internet arose from forums in two areas – academia and the military.

If you can harness positive emotions around your business, you’ll be in a powerful position – remember, people buy on emotion.

Examples of informal forums are at Yahoo groups. Other good ones are at www.tripadvisor.com, www.ultrashock.com .

Like any discussion group, an online forum needs rules, guidelines and quality control – it’s a serious undertaking but potentially very powerful and profitable. There are also legal issues particularly those relating to data protection and defamation. Go to www.dca.gov.uk for more on this.

You should also identify discussion forums in your sector. Take part, contribute and weave in subtle references to your site and business. Be careful to check the forum’s etiquette before you take part. Some are strict about obvious promotion. The trick is to be seen as a ‘giver’ not a ‘taker’. If you offer help on the net, ‘your cup will runneth over’.

One major benefit is that you'll usually be allowed to link back to your own web site - back-links help your Gogle rankings. The other is that content is hard work - a forum means that contributors are creating content for you.
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Advertising – use Google to make easy money!

As with affiliate marketing, there are two sides to advertising – also known as banner advertising - on the net. You can promote your business on other sites or offer adspace on your own site.

In many ways, advertising is anathema to the internet. The net’s a ‘pull’ medium – people use it to find information they want. They’re in control and anything that gets in their way is unwelcome. To overcome this, your advertising has to be creative, internet savvy (an interactive element helps) and above all, relevant.

A few years ago net advertising was very expensive. It’s now much more reasonable but you can still waste more money on it than on any other activity. If you think it’s worth a try, you must test different ideas and different sites. You can use your site logs to analyse whether the ads are directing traffic to your site. Measure response and conversion, both to sales and ezine subscription.

Another way to use advertising on the net is to think of yourself as a publisher and allow people to advertise on your site.

The easiest way to do this is through Google Adsense. You can subscribe at www.google.com/adsense. The way it works is that Google serves up Adword ads that are relevant to your site. You get paid every time someone clicks on an ad. You can customise the appearance of the ads too so that they fit with your site.

But probably more profitable is affiliatepowerads – instead of getting a few cents per click you can earn over $100 per sale. It’s just as easy as Google Adsense and a lot more lucrative. To find out how go to http://www.affiliatepowerads.com/start.php?m=paullock56

Advertising is a great way of adding interest to your site and generating some extra revenue, provided it doesn’t interfere too much with what you want people to do. The fact is though, that a high proportion of visitors won’t buy, so offering something that they might be interested in makes sense.

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  How to Market using Forums

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Related Forum Posts
Re: EC Forums Mentioned in the Financial Post - Hi Russell, Omnivore, The ads are in to try and make it a sustainable community. As the article suggests, most forums that get started, never get anywhere so it's a credit to Kevin and the moderators who have helped make the site a success. I haven't made any money from the forums for over a year (nor is it my intention to at the moment) - all the money right now that the forums generate go to support the forums and make it even better. The ads are also only big for non-registered users (as you experienced before logging in Russell). We get a lot of people who visit the forums but never participate - they take but never give anything back so this is a way that they can help contribute back to make the forums more successful. When you log in as a member the big ads disappear.
Is Spam to Blame?? - I was reading the post about affiliate and ebay work to make money and had a thought. It seems that a large number of people think that its really easy to make money online. It can certainly be done, but I agree the learning curve is LARGE. Another fun thing about the internet, is that many of the rules change on a regular basis. I know a woman who wrote a book about promoting online about 4 years ago. I've tried to suggest updating some elements of the book in a new addition - because so many of the rules and especially the SEO rules have changed MANY times in 4 years. But, she insists that the principals are still accurate. They still work, but not nearly as well as they did 4 years ago. My thought is that one of the reasons that people feel they can make big money quickly is because the mountain of spam that sells that idea, must be extremely effective. Or, its the problem that my father insists that everyone wants to make easy money. Sadly, neither, ebay or affiliate marketing are that easy and they all require a lot of learning and a lot of work. I used to work for some extremely successful affiliates and they worked insane hours - but they knew the secrets and made a lot of money. They were very clear when they told people it didn't happen overnight and it wasn't easy. Shri
Re: How Do You Check Google Ranking? - I often sign out all Google account before checking Google Ranking and i use "Grease monkey" Software which make it very easy by giving the SERP's in serial order.
computer franchise australia - we're #3! - I was looking through my web stats this morning and found that someone found the forums by searching for computer franchise australia in Google. It turns out that the forums rank #3 in Google for the search term. I hope it helps bring you some additional qualified traffic johnburns!
Want some idea about Clickbank ebooks - I would do a landing page. Trying to promote in forums is hard work and sometimes not aloud. Lot of forums doesn’t want you to promote another product. Most forums use Google adsense.


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