I'm on Proboards & we have an Affiliate Table we can put our "buttons" on. After 2 years, I haven’t acquired extra members as a result. I have found the members I do get are those I do Post Exchanges with or just have seen me posting on other forums.
I still do Affiliates but I don’t actively look for them anymore.
What is your opinion on Affiliates? Do you think they are helpful in getting the word out about your forum? When you go to a forum, do you yourself view them to see if there may be a forum you’d like to join?
I don't do affiliates at all. Many many many years ago I had a Pet website and did some affiliates with other people who had pets and that worked out in getting visitors to my site I think. The reason I gave up the site is because domain name registration was really expensive at the very beginning and I didn't have a job so keeping that hobby going was not what my husband wanted me to do. Instead, I purchased a domain name for my portrait business and did that for years.
When I go to other sites, I very rarely look at their affiliates. The only reason I looked at them this year at one time was to see if I should ask if they would be interested in joining FP...but I never got around to doing that.
It's something that we all do or did, isn't it? we say do you want to exchange affiliates and then we go ahead with the deal and end of the story. Aren't like we can track impressions and traffic from that link as we just exchange and as long as we can see each other's affiliates it's all well and good.
End results do not benefit me or maybe that site you dealt up with, Members do not really look at their affiliates. They rather go and do what they wanted to do. End up staff members or ourselves clicking on the affiliates link to see if the link works and the site still going XD
Yet, On my end, I still have affiliates showing and list, even though I do not add new affiliates deals anymore and I do check once or cable times a year to see if they still uphold the deal.
In the beginning, I did try this option whenever I saw an affiliate program on the websites I visited. I am not very good at bringing affiliates, therefore, I could never be very successful. These days I do not even care about affilites. I am not offering nay affiliate program with my sites
I have known my forums in the past to get interest through using affiliates on other forums which have been nice to see. I do feel that having a section on your forum for affiliates to be able to advertise other forums who are willing to advertise you, even if it doesn't bring a lot of traffic, can help in some cases and is always worth trying if it doesn't take up too much space on your forum.
My forum is ad-free and I consider affiliate buttons in the footer as an advertisement. So if I put affiliate buttons then I couldn’t really say it forum is ad-free anymore, now could I? 😛
If I did have ads then I suppose I could put affiliate buttons too, what’s another couple ads going to hurt if there’s already ads there in the first place?
I personally like the clean minimal look, that’s why I don’t have the “extended footer” enabled even though it’s included with most of the themes I have installed.
I do have a promotion directory forum though, members can post an ad thread there and they can also advertise in their signature (both are more effective than affiliate buttons in my opinion).
