Hey everyone.  I wanted to help kick off this community by posting something that I'm sure will be really useful to everyone here.  In fact you can put it to use as soon as you're done reading this post!

One of the first things everyone should do when joining and participating in a forum such as this one, is to create a signature file or "Sig File" for short.

Simply put, a sig file is nothing more than a line of text that follows everything that you post inside of the forum.  If you dig a little bit deeper though, you'll find that a sig file is a highly leveraged and powerful FREE TRAFFIC source. While the free part is pretty much self explanatory and should appeal to everyone, here's where the leverage happens:

You see, everything you post in a forum is archived and takes on a life of it's own.  In other words, it will be there until the end of time (or the end of the internet !).  Now if that post happens to become a really popular post, with a lot of relevant contributions from others on the given topic, it may get picked up and attain a high (even page one high) ranking in the search engines.  Now that post will have exposure that reaches far beyond just the scope of the forum! 

Now here is how it becomes a traffic source for you:

Your sig file doesn't have to be just a boring old line of text.  In fact it can be a really exciting line of text that you can link directly back to your own web site!

So when you put all of the pieces together (leverage + traffic source) you're looking at the potential of receiving website traffic both from inside the forum itself plus all of the people who find the forum post via the search engines.  For every one post you have in that forum, you'll also have a one-way link directly to your website!

As you can imagine, as time rolls on and as you make more contributions to the forum, you are increasing the amount of potential traffic to your website from one stupid, simple text link that sucks people into your website like magic.  Hell... five years from now you could still be receiving traffic from posts you don't even remember writing!

So here is how you put this thing into play:

When writing a sig file there are a few angles you could take.

1) You could write something that creates curiosity that almost defies people to not click your link. (Sometimes people just can't help themselves.  Take advantage of that.)

2)You can be totally up-front with your link... "I made my first youtube video!  Click here"

3)Or you can use flat-out Shock n' Awe! (see my sig for an over-the-top display of click sucking)  🙂

Some things to keep in mind...

Not all forums allow links in the sig file.  However John Oszajca is a marketer and totally gets the power behind this.  So by all means...link away.

Also, your sig file is the "appropriate" place for shameless self promotion.  Regular posters tend to not like topics that are clearly promotional, so sticking to the sig file is your best bet.

You can edit your sig any time you want and what's really neat is that every post you have made in the past will be updated with your new sig (as if free and leveraged wasn't enough )!

So here's how you do it:

First go to the very top of this page and click 'Profile'.  Next scroll all the way over to the right where it says 'Setup Your Signature' and click it.

This will open up a rich text editor where you can type your text, change the color and stylize to your heart's content.  When you want to put the link in just select all of your text, click the little picture of a chainlink and type:
'http://www.bockbock.egg' (without the apostrophes... and your real web addy of course) and that's it.

Might be a good idea to select the little drop-down menu and select "opens up a new window" (for the clicker's sake).

That's pretty much it.  Enjoy the forums.  Post early and often and watch the traffic trickle in.  Go back to every forum you participate in and rock your sig file.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts and  sharing ideas with y'all from now on!

-Steve