Work From Home

There are countless Forums online these days for all possible niches. (And if you can’t find one in your niche, Eureka! You’ve hit the jackpot! Start the first forum there and it’s like inheriting an oil well.) Identifying all the popular forums on your market or niche is a very important thing that all marketers should do for any online marketing campaign. For the really big, active forums with over 500,000 posts, simply go search for them by your keywords at http://www.big-boards.com.

Finding smaller forums is a little more tricky. Since there are many different software packages that forums are based on, there is no one good search command to find them all, except for adding the word “forum” to your search query. Try googleing each of your top five keyword phrases, in quotes, with the word forum slapped on the end, outside of the quotes.

Once you’ve found them, the big question becomes how you market to them without becoming a “spammer.” You will rarely find a forum, unless it’s strictly a “marketers’ forum” that allows you to post a blatent ad inside of them without it being deleted. What you’ve got to do is network a little. Answer any questions you have the answer to first to build up a presence for yourself.

However, what you are really looking for on a forum is a question that someone else asks that leaves room for you to answer, with your business being part of the solution.

So if you sell sprockets, and you find a great engineering forum, starting a new thread about your great sprockets or even offering information about how a great new sprocket line could solve many of their engineering problems will quickly be deleted, and it might even get your whole account booted! On the other hand, if you take a somewhat passive role on ALL the Engineering forums, and wait for someone to ask about a sprocket-related issue, you’ll be the hero, not a spammer, for offering your educated advice.

The moral of this story is to only market on forums when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question. In those situations, you can market as much as you want, and the outcome is a lasting link to your website tied to both name recognition & expertise.

Technorati : forum marketing, marketing, online marketing

Other than the big-name traffic like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!s text-ad programs, there are endless competitors for pay-per-click venues… More than you could imagine.

So many in fact, that yep, you guessed it, there are freebies here too for us to take advantage of. How much? Well, how about $1,215 in PPC money, without even showing a credit card? (With minimum bids as low as $0.005!) These types of “Old School” PPC engines are the dinosaurs of the net. Most of these companies you’re about to see are older than Google, and even older than any kind of Search Engine Ranking! Still, this method of gathering all these free targeted visitors to your website works great. It has been forgotten about and then well hidden by the old-timer PPC fanatics until recently.

So, how does it work? Below is a chart of Pay-Per-Click search engines that are currently giving away free sign-up bonuses. They don’t even want to see your credit card, just sign up and the money will be waiting for you inside the account.

I have personally verified each and every one of these by hand in making this report. To my knowledge there has never been a listing of them all in one place like this before, at least not with the amounts listed.

Keep in mind that each of these services will only allow one sign-up bonus per person, so make sure you are promoting the right program or combination of programs before you make all of your bids active.

So here are your 114,517 Clickthrus, sorted by traffic they send, most to least:

PPC Freebie Database:

Company Name $ Bonus
Search Post $ 550.00

End Find $ 100.00
Search 99 $ 85.00
Surf The Web $ 75.00
LinkAThon $ 50.00
Launch Jump $ 25.00

Meteor Surf $ 25.00
Search Mega $ 25.00
Seek Hawk $ 25.00
Seekster $ 25.00
Sci Seek $ 24.00
E Search Zone $ 10.00
Free Explore $ 10.00
Jiffy Seek $ 10.00
Kwick Search $ 10.00
Link Assist $ 10.00
Search Rabbit $ 10.00
Search Raider $ 10.00
Spider Jump $ 10.00
The Best Find $ 10.00
Searchooz $ 25.00
Harry Knows $ 25.00
Alternative Search Engine $ 10.00
The Dallas Explorer $ 10.00
Google Found $ 10.00

Mammoth Search $ 10.00
Search Pros $ 1.00

As you can see there are quite a few of these dinos still running… For every one giving away a freebie like this, there are easily 2 others that don’t! I doubt that some of those very generous listings at the top, such as SearchPost’s $550, will last forever, so at least sign up for your account and grab your bonuses before they change their policies.

It should go without saying that the faster you want your traffic to arrive, (accomplished with higher bidding) the fewer of those 114,517 visitors you will ever see. That’s just how PPC works. But don’t worry about having to pay too much for your highly competitive keywords, these guys don’t seem to compete on the same market with Google and Yahoo at all, so getting a couple of targeted clicks a day from each of them should be expected even at the minimum bid!

The numbers in this chart were compiled by hand by on New Years Eve 2006, but since this is a free-floating document, I have no control over when you receive this file or when these search engines change their policies. Drawbacks?
Well, you will have to put in a lot of keywords to get any steady traffic out of it. My home business niche has the very most heavily competed set of keywords there, so I opted to spend 1 cent across the board for each of 80 keywords related to Home Business. My results have been a steady trickle, as I usually come up in any search result as #2 to #4… So my website will ultimately receive 10-50 visitors a day from this source.

But that’s not using very many keywords for my niche; I just haven’t had time to go find them all. Once I do I should be able to get 10 times than many daily visitors from these free sources.