Using Forums as a source of traffic

As far as im concerned, this is the quickest way to get some traffic to your site, however it does require somewhat constant effort on your behalf to maintain the level of traffic.

Basically, you sign up to a forum that is of a similar topic to your forum, and have a link to your site in your signature which gets displayed after all of your posts. Keep in mind that some forums dont allow this, but most do. Usually a one line link is fine, however if you start sticking large banners in your signature expect that it might get removed. The best way to find out what is tolerated is to look around and see what the other forum members have in their signature and read the forum rules.

To find these forums, i suggest either doing a google search for eg 'soccer forum' , replace soccer with whatever topic your website is about. Also, there is a website Big-Boards.com that lists all the large forums. I suggest spending some time and looking over this list to find some relevent forums.

To place your link in your signature, you will need to:
- Register for the forum ;
- Go to Control Panel (or CP or Profile) ;
- Go to edit signature (may be different on different boards) ;
- Enter ususally BB code to link to your site.

An example of the BB code is:

[URL=www.google.com]Google[/URL]

This would display a link to www.google.com with the text Google. Note that some boards use different software so you may have to play around with the code a bit.