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!

Webmasters have keen interest in web sites such as Digg and others as those web sites can be of great use to them as far as gaining exposure and growing traffic are concerned. A perfect example of this is John Chow’s Blog. John Chow is a self proclaimed “Dot Com Mogul” and his blog has benefited greatly from the power of Digg and other similar web sites. A few months ago he made a post about the Top Google AdSense earners and once that post showed up at Digg.com, his blog grew at a rapid pace. Now, just two months later, the blog gets over 300,000 page views each month. Although he reported that his blog earned only $1,361.64 in October, after making some tweaks and writing a story about the World’s Most Hi-Tech Urinal, he made over $400 on one day alone and should significantly surpass his October total this month.

So, where is this long introduction heading? The value of SlashDot. In a post that was made recently, Chow talks about where his traffic came from. Although Digg may be larger than SlashDot, it actually drives less traffic to one’s web site. SlashDot is a tech news site just like Digg; however, unalike Digg, all news stories on SlashDot are posted by the many editors and the posts stay on the front page longer. While making the Digg homepage will only last a few hours, stories on SlashDot tend to be on the home page for 24 hours or more, which leads to more traffic. Obviously, it is much harder for a story to get on SlashDot, but you should still submit to the site as many webmasters are completely neglecting it due to the popularity of Digg. In Chow’s case, Digg only drove about 15% of the traffic or over 8000 uniques, while SlashDot drove about 33% of the traffic or 18,000 uniques.