Forum Posts Tracking

October 30, 2009 · Filed Under Making Money

Tracking the Progress of Your Forum Posts

Once you’ve mastered the basics of making your presence known in a forum, and you’ve got your signature file up and running, it’s time to see if your efforts are paying off.

The easiest way to check on this is to check your affiliate sales with your affiliate program manager. However, these figures won’t really tell you where your sales are coming from. If you’re using your affiliate link in several different forums, it will be impossible to tell which forum is buying the product – and you want to know which efforts are paying off and which ones are a waste of your time.A helpful program called PowerLink Generator will help you track how profitable your signature file is. With the program in place, you can give each affiliate link a special tracking code. You’ll be able to tell whether your sales are coming from Forum A or Forum B, and so on. The other useful feature of PowerLink Generator is the ability to “cloak” your affiliate links. This means your link won’t appear as an affiliate link. Here is an example of an uncloaked affiliate link:

http://www.affiliateprogram.com/youraffiliateid.html

The problem with this is that anyone familiar with affiliate marketing can remove your affiliate id and replace it with their own. You’ll lose out on your commission. With PowerLink Generator, you can cloak your affiliate link like this:

http://www.yourowndomain.com/recommendedprogram.html

Your affiliate id is completely hidden, and your potential customer is transferred directly to the sales page for the product you’re promoting. They purchase the product, and you get the commission automatically.

There’s another important step to affiliate marketing through forums. You may want to consider adding a list-building page that visitors arrive at before they are transferred to the sales page. This “squeeze” page will allow you to capture the names and email addresses of potential customers. Why is it so important to have customer contact information? Although affiliate marketing is very powerful and profitable, your eventual goal should be to create your own list of targeted niche customers.

When you add a squeeze page, you can collect information on your niche customers and market other products and services to them at a later date. Transferring customers directly from your sig file to the sales page with no squeeze page in between is like leaving money on the table. Take a few hours to set up a one page website that can capture email addresses, and you’ll reap the benefits for a long time to come. You can manage your mailing list with an autoresponder program like Aweber or GetResponse.

Autoresponder programs handle automatic mass email lists, and make your list management very simple. After setting up your initial list settings, you’ll be able to manage your potential customer list with just a click of a few buttons each month. Posting on forums can be a powerful springboard for the rest of your online career. The contacts you make there can help build your business quickly. The best part is that you can get targeted customers for no cost at all.

If you like to talk with others, and have time to post on forums, this can be a simple way to boost your sales. Once you’ve learned the ropes of forum marketing, you might want to try using other people’s writing in order to drive even more traffic to your squeeze page. The next step will show you how to develop a profit stream from content others have written.

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