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Promote yourself and/or your business indirectly through the use of Signatures

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Admin Team, Feb 5, 2015.

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  1. Admin Team

    Admin Team Administrators Admins

    Joined:
    Nov 6, 2014
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    Hi Folks,

    Several of our members are professional in their field with books, products, and services to sell, so we wanted to give all of you an opportunity to promote yourselves and/or your businesses indirectly to our growing community.

    On the one hand, we don't want this to be a community filled with Spam, which is why our rules strictly prohibit direct advertising by members anywhere on the site (e.g. posts, PM's, etc.). On the other hand, we know a lot of you are busy and have businesses to promote, so we wanted to give you an opportunity to promote yourselves here to make your participation here worth your while.

    So the idea is to allow you to promote yourselves indirectly by adding information and links to your services and/or products in your site Signature. Your Signature will then automatically appear at the bottom of every post you make across the entire site. The more posts you make, the more you indirectly promote yourself. This not only gives everyone an incentive to participate more here (quantity), but the indirectness of the promotion also gives you an incentive to participate with great contributions (quality) that give you the credibility that will make other users want to learn more about what you do and actually click on the links in your signature to find out and hopefully purchase your services or products.

    Furthermore, once we do a Hard Launch and make the Forums viewable to the Public, your posts will start to get a lot more exposure from both members and guests alike, so the promotional reach of your content and signature here will only grow.

    There are a few catches, however:
    1. To unlock the Signature feature, you must be a contributing member of the community and meet the following criteria:
      1. invite 1 trusted colleague or more to the Forums using the Invite tab above (they must join via your link),
      2. write 300 posts or more, and
      3. have been a member for at least 30 days.

    2. The text in the Signature must look professional, be no greater than Font Size "3" (which is 1 font size smaller than the default font size of posts), be no more than 2 lines long, and contain no images or formatting. This keeps the Signatures visually separate from the posts so that they do not disturb the flow of the discussion in the Forums. The smaller font size has the benefit of allowing you to add more content within the 2 lines of your Signature.

    3. Whatever site, product, or service you are promoting must be relevant to this site. In other words, please don't promote your hotel for pets as we want to keep things relevant here.

    4. You must be the owner of whatever it is you are promoting and no affiliate links can be used. So you cannot link to something you do not own. This ensures you are promoting yourself and/or something you do and not using your Signature to promote something or someone else.

    5. You cannot point other members to your Signature, otherwise it defeats the purpose of the "indirectness" of the promotion. Basically, we want to avoid everyone ending their posts with "Check my signature below to buy whatever I'm selling". Remember, the idea is for you to establish credibility through great content and participation that naturally drives members and visitors to want to learn more about what you do and therefore check your Signature on their own.

    6. No "Call-to-Action" words or phrases allowed in the Signatures. Call-to-Actions are phrases like "Click here" or "Check this out". Again, we want the Signatures to be professional.

    7. Links must contain anchor words and not be written out. So instead of writing "I run a poker site: www.mypokerstrategysite.com" you would write "I run a poker site." and "poker site" would link to your site. This is also to keep the Signatures looking professional.

    8. Your Signatures must be truthful. For example, don't say you've won a Poker tournament if you only cashed out but never actually won.

    We think the above are quite reasonable and will help maintain the high standards of our community. So, for example, if you won two Blackjack tournaments, wrote a book about Blackjack, and gave lessons, then you could have the following signature:

    _______________________________________________
    My name is John Smith, I won two Blackjack tournaments, and I coach and give private Blackjack lessons on my site.
    I also wrote a book about Blackjack called "Blackjack Card-counting Secrets".​

    In this example, the site link would link to your own website where you sold your coaching services and the book title would link to the Amazon page where your book is sold. That Signature would automatically appear at the end of all of your posts across the entire site, and as members and guests engaged with your knowledgeable posts and contributions, they would be inclined to want to learn even more from you and check out your products and services. For example, you might start a thread about your experience and the strategy you used to win a Blackjack tournament, the discussion in your thread gets indexed by Google. Then, some visitor searches for strategies on how to win Blackjack tournaments, your thread pops up in their Google search results, they click to view your thread, they like what you've said, so they check your Signature to learn more about you and end up buying your book and subscribing to your coaching services. That's an example of how your threads can lead to more sales from people who aren't even members of this community. It's a simple example but one that is quite realistic and happens all the time on Forums across the world. Exposure is key on the internet.

    Keep in mind that the opposite is also true, and if you either don't participate or your participation is limited to low-quality posts that don't really add much value to the community, then members and visitors will be less inclined to want to learn more from you or your products or services, so your Signature won't be as effective in promoting yourself.
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2016

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