Free forums provide an excellent opportunity to develop backlinks. Backlinks are essentials for generating organic traffic from search engines.  Don’t start your link building campaign using link exchanges. They are the most in effective methods and search engines frown manual as well as automated link exchanges.

While there are many ways to build incoming links to your site or blog posts, using forums for generating backlinks is one of the proven method. Following the seven steps discussed below, you will be able to start your forum-based link building campaign without using any reciprocal links.

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1. Create the right mind set. Don’t start your campaign by spamming every forum you come across during your online hours. You will soon find your link building campaign falling apart.  People will pile on you hateful comments. You will also loose the privilege of using the forums.

Free forums are for sharing and giving. Create a mind set of giving your knowledge to others for free without expecting anything in return. As a result, you will receive wonderful rewards indirectly.

2. Find a few popular free forums related to your niche. Use Google search using the keywords forum and your topic. Pick half a dozen forums from the search results and visit each one to assess their popularity.

When looking for a forum to join you want to find ones that are popular, so look for those with a decent number of members. You also need to make sure those members are active. Go into one of the more popular forums categories and scan down the list of threads to see when the last posting was made. If you see a lot of posts made in the last 24 hours, you’ve found a forum with lots of active members.

Make sure that the forums you have found accept signatures in the postings. Jump into one of the more popular threads on the forum. Scroll down and look at the posts to see if anyone has a signature showing at the bottom of their post. The signature will have links to the poster’s site.

3. Sign up and setup your signature. Sign up with two forums and create a profile. In the profile page, setup your signatures with links to your website. Use keywords or phrase related to your site for the anchor texts of the link. If it is possible, make the anchor text bold. Never use the URL for the anchor texts.

4. Join a webmaster forum dedicated to online marketing and search engine optimization, like digitalpoint forum. By regularly reading these types of forums, you will learn new online marketing and search engine optimization techniques. Make it a point to visit at least one forum a day and post at least two messages. Don’t post meaningless messages, like ‘thank you’, ‘great post’, etc. Provide some insights.

5. Once a week, create at least one new thread in the appropriate sub-forum. Use a catchy but relevant title to grab others attention to your topic. Ask thought provoking questions so that the discussions will benefit the community. Share your knowledge by posting some insightful thoughts in the form of articles backed up by relevant links. Respond to others who post comments to your threads but don’t use ‘thank you’ messages. Don’t promote your own links.

6. Don’t send unsolicited private messages to promote your ventures. Send unsolicited private messages when you feel that the message is not appropriate for the consumption of the entire community.

7. Forums are for building community and rapports with others. Don’t offend others and exhibit arrogant behaviors. Stay cool and respond politely even if someone initiates a flame war.

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During the early days of the web when I ran adult sites, traffic was plenty and a few software and scripts made my life easy. Once in a week I visited a few adult webmaster forums for getting all the knowledge and skills I needed to make money online while sleeping. Things have changed a lot. Now the competition is fierce. You need knowledge, skills and hard work to generate a decent online income.

I am lucky that even today my non-adult sites create a decent income but I am sure I can’t retire from my regular job on that income. I need to take some bold steps and make a quantum leap to increase my online incomes by four folds.

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I generate a small amount of affiliate incomes, all from clickbank.com, by throwing a few banners in my sites. I do realize that besides traffic, ad optimization by testing and measuring is very important to maximize incomes. However, it takes a lot of time.

I have been spending a lots of time reading blogs about keywords, different channels for affiliate marketing, landing pages, etc. I am also frequenting a webmaster forum (forums.digitalpoint.com) to learn what is going on in today’s online marketing.

I used to wonder why there were so many web directories. I don’t go to a web directory to search for any thing. I don’t know who goes to a web directory for their searches. I even don’t know anybody going to dmoz.com, supposed to be the best in its class, for searches.

Now I know why there are so many web directories. They give you back links to your site for a price and they hawk their services using some thing called PR – Point & Research. Oops, I am wrong. It is Page Rank. Had I known this directory business a few years ago, I would have started 15 web directories. Oh well, I missed my opportunity.

Then there are digg bosses, stumble upon exchanges, publishing articles in 40 blog networks for $10, useless traffic to your site for ranking high in Alexa so that you can sale text links. I did not know that people are selling text links. I thought that only Google did that. And there are a scores of other techniques. Lots to learn. My head hurts.

I am learning slowly but I need to jump start my online income fast. How do I do that? People are generating monthly six-figure incomes from affiliate marketing. That’s what I need to do to become super rich. Gotta go for my forum visit.

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