When you are looking for relevant places to advertise your website, you cannot really get much better than forums. They are a minefield for some people, but if you learn how to use them properly, and within the rules of the particular forum, they can be a goldmine. If the forum allows signatures, then you can put a link to your website in there and get some traffic flowing to your site for nothing. It will only cost your time, and will pay you dividends over many years. Your link will be on the internet as long as the forum is alive, and considering some big forums have been online since 1995 and going strong – it is genuinely a good investment of time.

If you can be the guy that provides the answers to people, then you can certainly be the one who gets a lot of traffic. People respect others who help people out, and if you can be that guy – then you will get the traffic. All you need to do is look for the questions that people are asking the most, and then go and research the product/service. You can usually find answers on places like Yahoo! Answers or Wikianswers. There’s also millions of online blogs. If you are willing to do the digging, and you enjoy helping people, this could end up being your sole source of traffic. A lot of people get traffic daily by helping people like this. If you get a reputation for being the forum’s ‘go to guy’, people are more likely to take what you say as authoritative, and any link you post will be followed. This is a good place to be.

If you cannot find the answer to a question, you can still actually participate in the conversation, by doing a little research on the niche, and then posting a comment. Even this has the capability to get traffic.

Blogging can be a pain in the butt if you do not want to spend time ensuring the site is up to standrads that search engines now demand.  They require more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.

You can argue the point that most of the autoblogs out there are spinning content to 30% unique, and they are getting away with page one rankings with Google – but for how long? You really need to add enough content to ensure Google thinks you are an authority on your niche subject, and starts pumping traffic your way, based on this trust. That word has now become a beacon for most webmasters, because Trustrank is well and truly here. Google is now ranking sites NOT just based on their inbound links, but also on their outbound links (amongst other things under the Trustrank banner). If your site has no selfless outbound links – which can link to any site – then your site has less chance of ranking higher. The best place to observe this is on website flipping sites like Flippa.com. You can check the micro-niche blogs that advertise Amazon products. These guys rank up high in the SERPs, and all include Trustrank methods. You will see few that do not have outbound links in their sidebars…

Another big deal over at Google HQ has always been backlinks. You may have seen recently that Angela and PJ’s backlinks have been penalized by Google, and their sites have received a drop in Pagerank. This is testament to the fact that all your backlinking activities should be natural and relevant. Always be wary of purchasing backlinks – it may harm your site if you do!