Make Money Using Forums

Posted by Marko | Filed under Affiliate Marketing

If you are like most affiliate marketers out there then you know how hard it is to break into the PPC game.  Yes, its quite possible, but it comes with a cost and a high one at that.  Well, here it is, step by step instructions how to make money using forums and not only will you make money for a short time if you follow this but you will be bringing in more and more each month.

I am going to assume you have signed up with some affiliate company’s, if you haven’t, there are some links in the right column under “My Money Makers” which will take you there.

Step 1:  Pick a Niche that you know forums exist for.  The one I did, and still do, is car warranties.  I’m not like most affiliates, I’ll tell you what I’m running because I know 95% of people will be too lazy to follow through with this.

Step 2:  Open up Excel and create 3 columns:  Site, Login and Password

Step 3:  Go into Google and search for forums related to different brand cars; BMW, Mercedes, Lexus etc…  I focused on more expensive cars because those are the people with money to buy warranties and those are usually the cars that you’d want extended warranties on.

Step 4:  Sign up on a few forums a day, don’t overwhelm yourself, it gets boring.  I would sign up on one, pimp out my profile, find a pic of a related car, add a signature without any links and make a few posts.  Respond to anything you have knowledge about, even if its just some rims you like on a persons car.  Do this everyday until you have about 30 solid accounts that look legit.

Step 5:  Keep signing up!  I know you haven’t hit 30 yet, so keep going.  Log into the ones that you have signed up in and stay active, 1 or 2 posts every few days, it only takes 5 minutes.  Don’t be lazy, this is the key here.  Keep thinking I am going to make money, hundreds of dollars a day from this so keep going!!

Step 6:  Find a domain to use.  Don’t use one you have because people hover over links and will know, find one related to your niche.  Doesn’t matter if its long but it has to be relevant.

Step 7:  Setup folders on your new domain.  Have a folder for each car maker or find a way to categorize your niche.  So if I have the domain, carwarrantiesforless.com and I was posting on a BMW forum, it would be carwarrantiesforless.com/BMW/Offerlink.php

Step 8:  Find some offers.  Dont just get the ones that pay out the most.  Look at how they are performing, look at the landing pages and make your decision from there.  I found ones that used BMWs in their landing pages and those kicked ass on the BMW forums.  Keep your max at 3 offers.

Step 9:  Setup your affiliate links.  Now that you have folders like; BMW, Lexus, Audi etc., its time to setup a redirect.  I ususally name mine like this, bmw-warranty.php and drop that in the BMW folder, then bmw-cheap-warranty.php and so on.  name them differently is the key.  I use a php redirect to hide my affiliate links.

So this is the code you put on those pages I just listed: <?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.affiliate-link-goes-here.com’ ) ;
?>

Make sure to add the different affiliate links to the different pages.  bmw-warranty.php and bmw-cheap-warranty.php should go to different offers.

Step 10:  Go back into the forums and seach for warranty, when you find ones, start posting.  Write something like “I got my warranty at (link here) for $1200 and it covers all parts for 48,000 miles.” Or something like that, I usually look at the original post and make it relevant to it.  But, I have also just posted straight links, 4 at a time, and they stayed up without getting deleted.  I only suggest this if your account is older and you have more then 100 posts.

After you get the ball rolling, this is easy.  Find forums that interest you and you will have no problem staying active.  The method I described to you makes me about $500 a month and I only have links on 4 forums.  After about 6 months add some links in your footer, should help out some too.  Enjoy!!

PS.  Leave me some comments and tell me what you think.  I have other methods I use and have no problem revealing but I want to know that someone is getting something out of this.

Marko

Tags:

Permalink | August 5th, 2008

3 Responses to “Make Money Using Forums”

  1. Scot Says:
    August 10th, 2008 at 2:58 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    The only problem I see with this is if you’re using the search feature your link may not be seen by many people since it may be dated. What about using the PM to PM whoever asked the question?



  2. CD Says:
    August 11th, 2008 at 9:54 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    Pimp stuff!



  3. Marko Says:
    August 12th, 2008 at 6:18 am MyAvatars 0.2

    @ Scot - You can use the PM feature but that would take some more work and every PM would have to be custom written… I have found that even old posts bring traffic because when people are searching for something specific they will usually dig pretty deep into the pages to find it, so as long as you post those links into every relevant post you will be good!



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