How long do you usually spend your time every day in forums? Five minutes, half an hour, two hours? Well, whatever it is, if one of your daily internet habits is participating in forums, then why don’t you leverage that activity to drive targeted traffic to your website?

I’m not suggesting you to post spammy messages on forums. While there may be some forums that allow you to link to your website directly from your message, most forums will probably only allow you to link from your signature line. This is how you drive traffic from forums, by using your juicy signature line. Even if the forum allows you to link directly from the message, you still don’t want to sound spammy, because people won’t click on your link if you’re perceived as a spammer.

Now while forums may not bring tons of traffic to your website and the traffic will usually only last for a very short time, it’s very easy to implement. Just by participating normally (with that juicy signature links attached to every message that you post), you can get traffic to your website. Of course, if you want to get the best out of this activity, you need to build an email opt-in list from your forum’s traffic.

Why’s that? Because, as I’ve said above, the traffic will usually not last for long. It will usually burst only after you post a new message on the forum, but after your new post get pushed by other newer posts, then it will start to slow down and eventually dies. When I said “dies”, I don’t mean “completely dies”. Sometimes you’ll see some people still coming from your old posts, but it’s very rare.

Now if you try to make a sale directly from your forum’s traffic, you’ll probably have a hard time on doing that. Most of your site’s visitors usually don’t purchase at their first visit and if you’re just generating traffic from forums without building your list, you don’t have any means to contact them later. But if you capture their email addresses, you’ll have the ability to contact them and follow them up, thus increasing your chance of getting sales from them.