Continued from page 1
Let's ignore
fact that you're targeting
wrong audience. There's another problem with this. A lot of people who read your message may be looking for good affiliate products to promote. So they might click your link just to see if this might be a good affiliate program.
In this case, you may be creating more competition for yourself. You're giving people a link to an affiliate program that's (presumably) working for you. Usually, I would prefer to keep a good affiliate program to myself. I don't need more people competing with me.
One last issue to think about when including links in your signature. This complicates
picture a bit.
So far, I've been talking about how to effectively advertise products to other people. But there's also another good reason for including links in your signature. You may want to advertise to search engines.
Here's what I mean by that. Whatever you post on a forum will probably be indexed by search engines eventually. And if there are links in your post, then
search engine spiders will follow those links.
So your posts on forums could actually serve as incoming links to your own web sites. If this is your purpose, then you may want to formulate
title of your link a little differently.
You should base your link title on keywords that are appropriate for your web site. For example, if I'm selling a product that cloaks affiliate links, I would probably link to it with something like "cloak affiliate links" or "cloaking affiliate links". And I would use
*same* title for this link *every* time I posted it to a forum.
You can see that your approach to creating a signature for forum posts will be different depending on what your purpose is - to advertise to people or search engines. So make sure you know what your purpose is, and link accordingly.
P.S. If you missed
first article on marketing to forums, you can read it now at http://www.dave-brown.com/articles/forums1.html.

Dave Brown is a self-taught marketer and software developer. He also publishes the uncommon and uniquely original newsletter on making the most of your life - A Fresh Perspective. You can learn more at http://www.dave-brown.com