Many website owners visit webmaster-related forums such as Digital Point, Site Point, Namepros, and many others on a frequent basis. Every user on these forums gets a signature, a message that is automatically added below each post made by them that can contain texts, links, or even images. These signatures can be very valuable for Internet marketing purposes.

The value of forum signatures is two fold. First, forum signatures can provide high quality exposure and generate targeted leads to the business that utilizes that space. For example, comments posted at an Internet marketing forum will receive targeted exposure from the Internet marketing community and webmasters in related fields, and naturally, signatures plugged into these posts will attract their attentions as well. Whether the signature space contains a link to a web site, corporate brand image, or political slogan of your choice, it sure will catch the eyes of the targeted community behind the forum.

The second benefit of forum signature lies in search engine optimization. Due to the advances of forum scripts as well as search engine spiders’ crawlability, it is pretty common nowadays that website links shown in forum signatures are crawled and indexed by search engines. For example, Digital Point forum, one of the most well-known Internet marketing forums, has more than 140,000 Google-indexed forum pages as of March 2007, and these pages contain individual forum members’ signatures as well as any website links contained therein.

If you place a web site link in your signature and make posts on a heavily crawled search-engine friendly forum, you may be getting as many back links to the web site, that are quickly indexed by search engines. The benefit of such forum back links depends on how popular and how authoritative the forum is in the eyes of search engines. Most forums with more than 100,000 non-spammy human posts usually have very good search engine rankings. You can check the search-engine authority of a given forum by posting a few time and checking how soon your posts are indexed by search engines.

The back links from forum signatures will not count as many different back links coming from different domains, but forum signatures are a great free way to increase Google PageRank and search engine rankings. A recent case study conducted by several webmasters at NamePros.com revealed that with just one link in the signature of a user with 50 posts, they were able to increase the Google PageRank of their new sites from PR0 to PR3.

Although forum signatures bring these marketing benefits, individual signatures are not equally valuable. Naturally, the more active you are as a forum member, the more frequently your signature shows up, and thus, the higher benefit it will bring. Not only the number of posts, but also the quality of your posts determines the value of your forum signature. The signature space of a member who posts five knowledgeable and thoughtful comments a day will exert more power than that of a member who posts dozens of meaningless spams, both in terms of quality exposure and in terms of search engine ranking benefit.

You would like to have the benefits of the signature space, but do not have time to make posts and engage in a forum community? Then you can purchase other members’ signature space. At the Digital Point forum’s Marketplace, signature links are purchased and auctioned off in the “Links” section for a range of monthly prices. A signature from an active and reputable member is being purchased for as much as $40 to $50 per month. Such high price tags allude to their effectiveness.

If you have not tried forum signature marketing yet, maybe you should. You will be surprised at the result!

One of the most generally accepted facts in the webmastering community is that forums are very hard to monetize and that there are better online industries to go into. This fact holds some truth, as forums generally do not perform will in terms of AdSense and other PPC click through advertising programs; however, forums are a goldmine for CPM advertising revenue. CPM means cost per thousand page views and with forums, each user who views just three or four threads usually registers 10 or more page views. Hence, if you have a forum with a few members who visit and read through it on a frequent basis, you can easily get 5000 page views or more daily.

The amount you get per 1000 impressions from programs such as AdSense is miniscule; however, if you can attract sponsors by yourself and sell advertising, a forum can easily earn $5-$10 CPM with very little work with just 2 or 3 ads and then as you attract more advertisers, many “big time” forum owners can earn $20+ CPM with 8-10 site wide advertisements in the forum of links and banners of all sizes. With just 5000 page views daily, forum owners with a $20 CPM rater can earn an income of $100 a day and over time as your forum grows, your page views will skyrocket and you can easily earn upwards of $200-$300 a day from advertising.

However, it can be very difficult to find advertisers and there are few web site owners on webmaster forums that will be willing to pay even $2 or $3 CPM for any form of online advertising. That is why you need to network and get advertisers who are willing to pay decent amounts for advertising to visit your web site. The only way to do this is to contact them directly or find a network that will contact them for you. This is not a get rich quick tip, but if you stick with a forum and let it grow, you can earn six figures with a forum, and many forum owners who have realized this do.