Forum Marketing

A great way to drive free targeted traffic to your affiliate site and make commissions is to participate in forums. Forums are a great place to both learn new ideas and information and also market at the same time by helping others. In most forums you can put a link in your signature and many forums allow multiple links so you can promote more than one site. In forums you basically have discussion threads where people ask questions and others answer them. To build up your reputation it is important to answer questions in a thoughtfull and respectfull way. Most forums will show your track record for posting and that is how you build up a reputation and get more visitors and earn commissions.
The best strategy to follow is to first find two or three high traffic forums about the topic of your affiliate site. To find out if a forum has high traffic go to alexa.com for the traffic data. Any forum with an alexa rank of less than 5,000 is worth joining. Next you just start posting as much as possible. Over time your traffic should start building as you accumulate posts and build your reputation. When you participate in forums it is very important not to spam. Only putting an advertisement in forums and not contributing anything of value will just get one banned. Another thing to help build a good reputation is to be respectfull of others in the forum and be postitive.
A couple of forums that I participate in and recommend is the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forum. Both are very high traffic sites. I especially recommend the warrior forum because some of the biggest names in affiliate marketing hang out there and the forums focus is affiliate marketing. Digital point is also a great place to get traffic from. They have an alexa rank of 180 and just get an enormous amount of traffic.
All you have to do to tap this traffic is post frequently. Another nice thing about digitalpoint is that they share adsense revenue providing another income stream.Forum marketing is not likely to make anyone rich quick but if one posts to them regularly over many months one can build up an income from it.