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.

When your visitors arrive at your site, there is a great way of retaining their interest, and actually getting their contact details that most marketers now use. The method is of course free ebooks and guides, in return for their email address and name. You will see a small optin capture box on a home page on a blog, which will say something like “register now for a completely free guide on such and such niche”. This is a very powerful way of getting both the interest piqued in your prospect, and getting their contact details for future upsells. The problem most people have with this is the content itself. A 3000 word ebook is quite costly when you are looking for quality, and PLR is a little bit of a problem most times, because it is quite often rehashed information that they have read elsewhere on the internet.

The quickest way to get 3000 words together for a free guide is to head over to Wikianswers and Yahoo! Answers. They will have lots of questions about your niche on there, usually, and then you can be assured of the answers because this is the whole reason these sites are set up. When you put together a “Top 25 Tips on Dog Breeding” or whatever your niche is, the visitor will be very quick to give their email address, because a) it is free, and b) it is completely related to why they are there in the first place. You can find questions and answers on almost any subject, and you can usually guarantee that the content will be totally unique to the reader – because very few people use this method of gathering content. You only need to rewrite it a very small amount for it to be unique, and people will never notice that this is content from the web. Nobody ever reads through an entire questions site…

When you are generating interest in your blog, the first thing you should consider are social communities like Yahoo! Answers, and Wiki Answers. Whilst these do not let you post your links right away, you can contribute to them, and eventually your links will take hold. The very best method I have seen with this technique, is outsourcing to a team who will post relevant answers, which link to your site, but only on the very latest posted questions. You can just pay for each time they post an answer, which means you will not need to pay hourly. This will create an initial buzz and generate traffic to your site, being one of the first replies.

The way to ensure you get on the most recent questions, is to do a Google search. You can of course teach this to your outsourcer. Go to Google.com main search page, and search for your one of your main keywords, such as “dog grooming”. You also need to search within the Yahoo! Answers site, so your search would read as follows:

site:http://answers.yahoo.com dog grooming

In the results, you will notice a left sidebar, which asks you how you want to retrieve the search results. You can select from a date range of Past 24hrs, Past Week and so on. If you click past 24hrs, you will see results from just the past day, enabling you to target the most recent questions… and be one of the first answers, thus creating initial traffic. As the answer gathers popularity, more traffic will be sent there from Google, Yahoo! and Bing, because the answer style sites like Yahoo! Answers and Wikianswers are held in high regard by the search engines.

Remember, you only get your answers published if they are not in any way spammy. So either you, or your outsourcers, must make sure that the content you publish is both respectful, and is a valid contribution.