affiliate forum marketingNOTE: This post is on affiliate forum marketing. If you’re looking for an affiliate marketing forum, click here for a list of my favorite sites.

If you’re trying to increase affiliate sales through extensive forum postings, I want to give you a strong word of caution.

Affiliate forum marketing can have a role in an overall affiliate sales strategy, but doing so effectively is a subtle art that you need to work on over time.

For a better approach to your marketing efforts, I recommend you follow this free training.

What To Watch Out For

Most marketing forums aren’t new to the game, and can often be fairly sophisticated when it comes to approving content.

For anyone who knows what they’re doing, affiliate links are easy to spot, and including affiliate links directly within a forum post runs the risk of getting your comment marked as spam.

Not only that, but you could be banned from the site altogether, which does nothing to help you grow your user base and increase sales.

Ok, But…So What?

In addition to potentially missing out on future opportunities, if your post includes a link to your website along with the affiliate link (eg: in your author bio or short profile), and your link then gets marked as spam, you’re running the risk of associating your website with spam content.

This is the “bad neighborhood” philosophy of internet marketing. Search algorithms will determine link quality in part based on what other pages that link is associated with.

If your site is consistently on low quality sites or within posts marked as spam, you’ll gradually be giving search algorithms the impression that your site, too, is nothing but spam.

Needless to say, this could have detrimental results.

How To Do Affiliate Forum Marketing Correctly

If you are going to market your site to a forum, don’t include affiliate links within your posts, and don’t write content for the sole purpose of linking back to your site.

Create a profile, and within your short bio include 1 link to your webpage (usually to your home page).

Then participate in the forum as would any other user. It’s not a “one and done” strategy, but an act of building up a reputation within the forum over time.

To me, personally, I don’t think that the effort involved is worth the results. A single post or two doesn’t do much. I can get better results organically when I spend my time working on my sites than trying to answer a zillion questions on others.

If you want to read more about the strategy and schedule I use, click here.