THE SIG-LINK BLOG

Sig-Link Cracks 100 Users

I’m pleased to say that Sig-Link now has over 100 registered users.

It’s great to see so many people have signed up at this early stage to this new concept.

It’s still early days though and I hope to see many more users and auctions up over the coming months. So if you aren’t already involved please register and list an auction to sell your signature. Or buy one for some easy backlinks and targeted traffic. It’s all FREE!

Anyway, thanks to all the early adopters

SEO Blackhat Poker Tournament - Are you (all) In?

I’ve just signed up for the SEO Poker Tournament. It’s Poker with a twist. Basically to buy in you have to put a quality link up for grabs.

It’s an awesome idea, Seoblack hat not only gets the well deserved linkbait. But also sprinkles his Full Tilt Poker affiliate link across the page.

I fancy myself an ok player and its free so why not.

If your interested sign up here: http://poker.seoblackhat.com/

Update: I had an unavoidable engagement so I missed it -  which sucks because I was looking forward to it all month. But I think they’re planning another one so fingers crossed they’ll let a previous no show in.

Signature Link Calculator: 2nd Test

As I said I would do in my first post, I’m again testing the Signature Link Calculator by looking at previous Digital Point signature auctions.

I’ll start with the first one that successfully sold, and work my way back. I’ll ignore those that haven’t sold, and those that are sold at BIN (buy it now) because that usually doesn’t reflect the true market value.

#1 auction here, calculated price $7, sold for $7

#2 auction here, calculated price $48.14, sold for $20

#3 auction here, calculated price $99.88, sold for $100 (I know I said I wouldn’t include those sold at BIN, but this one was just too close to pass up)

#4 auction here, calculated price $10.03, sold for $9

#5 auction here, calculated price $4.18, sold for $5

So all in all pretty close, I wish I could remember my statistics so I could work out the standard of deviation, but I can’t even really remember what that is…

I’ll do this again every once in a while, it’s good for me to stay on top of it anyway. The calculators been getting a bit of criticism as it seems to grossly overinflate massive posters signature values, but I think their just bots anyway.

Interview With The Avatar Master Stuart From Site Sift

In my last post I was raving about the DP avatar phenomenon, where every second poster has the Sift Sift Web Directory Logo as their avatar - (though now the Seven Seek Directory avatar looks like a strong competitor). So I thought I’d try to get the story from the man himself:

<--Starts--> (Questions are in bold)

Could you give us a brief history of yourself and the Site Sift Web Directory.

Sure… I started Site Sift in Sept. 2004 after being frustrated with the customer service and submission guidelines of *some* directories. Often directories had no time frames to review your submission and some had very strange submission guidelines. I saw an opportunity for a directory that had fast review times and submission guidelines that actually made some sense.

It would be great to hear the story of the avatar promotion from the horse’s mouth.

Not a whole lot to it I guess… I’m just the first person to do it on such a large scale. Many webmasters come to forums on a daily basis for information, services, tools and social interaction with peers. The Digital Point Forums is by far the most popular webmaster forum and I often spend numerous hours a day in the Buy/Sell/Trade section. For our web directory (Site Sift) we couldn’t have a more target advertising demographic than the Digital Point Forums.

Signature advertising has gone on for quite some time and provides a great ROI. I wanted to give Site Sift a little more exposure while focusing on the brand. I figured if we could get our Site Sift avatars in a good number of posts on a single forum it would make an impact. Banner and contextual advertising just doesn’t have the same impact because most webmasters are blind to them.

My goal was to get our avatar in 100,000 posts on the Digital Point Forums. I think within 3-4 hours we had more than 150,000 avatars out there. We spent a few dollars renting avatars for 30 days but most of the webmasters that have been around Digital Point for sometime did it without compensation. The last time we counted we had our avatar in over 247,877 posts.

The avatar promotion was obviously a great success in terms of branding, but have you actually seen much of an increase in traffic?

Yes… we are experiencing a huge increase of traffic through Google for the term “Site Sift.” Those are obviously the webmasters that don’t know who we are and they Google us since there is no direct link to our site from the avatar. Plus there are numerous threads on the Digital Point Forums where people have linked to our site.

I think anytime you get someone to type your business name into a search engine they are more likely to remember you than just following a link and closing the browser right away.

Would you care to share your avatar buying budget?

We didn’t spend very much… again many forum members did it because they wanted to. Total spent was in the low to mid $XXX range.

Owning a directory, you must know a fair chunk about search engine optimization. Do you think signature link affect a sites backlinks and hence the site’s position in the search engines?

In the search engine optimization world that is an *it depends* question. If you have a new site and hasn’t gained the trust of the search engines yet then having your link in thousands of post in several forums might not be the best thing.

Webmasters (in general) are notorious for whoring off their sites/blogs/signatures/avatars etc. Do you think you could achieve something similar to the avatar promotion in a non webmaster forum?

Sure… why not! We own several non-webmaster forums and someone could do something similar to what I did and create buzz and increase traffic. Most people outside of webmasters never see any money for their online contributions (posting and blogging) and changing an avatar would be nothing to them but a quick buck.

Your promotion has clearly shown the power of forum marketing, do you see a future for business’s based around this?

Advertising through webmaster contributions has only increased in the past year… I see no end to this in the near future. With that being said currently it is easy to sell your signatures or avatar yourself and doesn’t take up much time. There may be a small market place for a broker but I bet most webmasters prefer to facilitate these simple transactions themselves.

Thanks again Stuart

Thanks Jules! Have a good holiday!

The Great Digital Point Avatar Phenomenon

If you’ve visited DP in the last couple of days you’ve probably noticed that every second person has the Site-Sift Christmas logo in their avatar.

It’s pretty complicated so correct me if I’m wrong but as far as I can tell, it all started with this thread where Stuart offered to pay people (how much?) to put the logo in their avatar.

Then this post by aptly named payitforward in general chat, brought even more members who did it just for fun. Check out the top posters page if you want to see its success or just browse in DP, though I warn you, its really confusing.

This is an amazing viral marketing idea, I had thought about doing something similar, but I decided to stick to signatures instead (*kicks myself*).

I wonder how much actual traffic this has brought him, maybe not too much as the avatars are not links, but for the branding value alone I’m sure its worth it.

As is often the case there’s already a copycat, Sevenseek Directory, though I couldn’t find a thread about it, and I’m sure within a week their will be dozens more.

In Stuart’s Blog, he claims the unofficial world record for avatar advertising, and says the Site-Sift avatar is on 247,877 posts. Amazing.

My DP Webmaster Offer

Ok. So I’m nearly ready to launch the site…but obviously its not very appealing with very few (currently 5) signatures listed.

After putting close to $1000 so far into this project I’d like to get a fair amount of signatures listed before the real marketing starts…for cheap.

So heres my offer

- Put 1 sig up for auction and I will make 30 posts in your forum. For 2 sigs 60 posts etc. (Max 4, I can also create up to three usernames).

or

- Put one sig up for auction and I will review your site, aesthetics, SEO, ease of use etc.

also

- Put 5 sigs up for auction and I’ll give you a 3 month link here on this blog in the blogroll.

-Every Signature listed put you into the draw to win a regular (non reciprocal) Alive Directory link, worth $34.95.

Conditions

You must have over 50 posts.

Signatures can be from any forum (as long as they allow them).

Please select a reasonable price. If your not sure use the Signature Calculator on the homepage, it’s very accurate.

Please select a 7 day (or more) duration and select to re-list if not sold a minimum of 5 times, though the higher the better

Please try to fill in as many details as possible, there’s custom fields so it’s easy. The entire process should take about 5-10 minutes.

Remember to follow through with the sale.

And PM me here to give me a link to your auction(s) and claim your reward. I’ll announce the Alive Directory winner here on December 25.

Other than that I can only plead (yes I’m begging) that you will take up my offer - or just list one for fun. I honestly believe forum signature marketing will be the next big thing and hope you guys will join me.

To get started go here and then register

Applying Copywriting in Signatures

This is a followup to the 8 steps post. This guy claims in DP to have increased his click through rate by over 1000% just by using simple (and obvious) copywriting techniques. Have a look at his well written sig in the above link.

Anyway he explains the experiment in his blog much better than I could.

8 Easy Steps for an Effective Traffic Driving Signature

1. Target the right niche. If your signature has websites unrelated to the forum in it, your audience won’t be interested.

2. Use contrasting colors. E.g. if the forum background is light blue, use colors that stand out against it.

3. Provide a call to auction. Use words like “apply now”, “check it out”…etc.

4. Create a sense of urgency. Try “places limited, offer expires in 6 days”…etc. But be honest - see step 6.

5. Offer a forum specific incentive “example forum members only”.

6. Write quality posts. If you present yourself as an expert in your field, people will be more likely to click your signature. Remember it’s much easier to lose reputation than gain it, so try to remain consistently professional.

7. This ones probably not for everyone, but as Shoemoney notes chick avatars bring teh traffic.

8. Explain your site, write a real sentence if it’s not clear what your sites about.

Example: Bad Sig | Good Sig

The Signature Link Calculator

I’ve had a signature link calculator made to make it easier for everyone to price and buy signatures. Its often quite difficult to put a value on a signature. Some people will prefer a high total post count while some will prioritize posts per day. I feel both are very important, so I developed the equation based on both.

You can view the calculator on the homepage of Sig-Link.

To prove its accuracy I’m going to take a look at a few of the last signature auctions at the Digital Point forums, from 28 November through to 1 December, (New Zealand time).

#1 Auction here, calulated price $7.11, sold for $7.50

#2 Auction here, calculated price $1.93, sold for $3

#3 Auction here, calculated price $3.17, sold for $5

#4 Auction here, calculated price $5.1, sold for $5

To get those examples I had to skip over a few as I only wanted to show those with a DP signature that was selling on a per month basis. Also some of the auctions were not clear if they were sold or not. I’m quite disappointed I couldn’t find any sales with large total post counts, so I’ll repeat this exercise in a week or two.

In the meantime, feel free to visit this section of Digital Point and test it for yourself. I’d appreciate some feedback.

The Concept

This is the first post so I guess I should explain what Sig-link is all about. I’ll start with the basics, as after explaining it at length to my friends and family, they generally replied “Ok I think I understand but could you tell me one more time what a signature is.”

A forum signature is text and/or image(s) that a forum poster will add to their profile in order to automatically generate the text or image underneath each post they make. If a forum allows signatures, than it’s likely they will allow more than one.

The idea behind Sig-Link is for forum posters and website owners to come together for their mutual benefit. Website owners will be able to advertise their websites (by buying signature links) to people interested in their niche (topic). And forum posters will be able to earn a small compensation from their time spent posting in forums. So its a win/win situation, especially since their are no fees to start a basic auction.

To get started go here, register, and start an auction. If your not sure how much to start it at, try the new Sig-Link Calculator. More on that in the next post.

http://www.sig-link.com