Do people bother reading affiliate forums anymore?
April 26, 2007
Since my online time has dramatically been cut down since I started traveling, I find myself spending much less time reading webmaster and affiliate forums than I used to. I regularly check various blog feeds, which help me to keep up to date, but not so with forums.
When I first got into affiliate marketing, I discovered webmasterworld and literally spent hours reading all of the discussions on affiliate programs and Adsense. Now I occasionally read the front page items of webmasterworld, but rarely delve much further.
I took a look yesterday at the Adsense discussion and all of the topics were pretty much the same as they were two years ago - ad placement, increasing earnings, made for Adsense sites, getting banned and so on. It is kind of frustrating, because if people actually read Google’s TOS, most of their questions would be answered.
Forums are great if you have just started learning about making money on the internet, but if you are fairly experienced you are probably just wasting valuable time.
To be honest, I find John Chow’s blog the most informative at the moment. I can’t imagine him missing any big news in the world of making money online.
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4 Responses to “Do people bother reading affiliate forums anymore?”
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With the constant influx of new people to the game all of them needs to learn the basics first. Same us you did those years ago (perhaps the “big shots” of internet of those days thought similarly of your posts
).
And they don’t read the TOSes because who actually does at the beginning? Its much easier and more fun to get into some forum and obtain an instant answer.
I’m right at that point after 9 monts forumed out
I have just started adding new blogs & things to read ! I nearly deleted all my favorites the other day just so i wouldnt do the normal rounds so to speak.
Interesting topic…
You would think forums would die down with all the blogs and other Web2.0 options. Some of the them have and some have gone stale.
But my 5 Star affiliate forum is the busiest it’s ever been and just had a huge growth spurt. We’re getting not just lots of newbies, but also lots of pros like James Martell and the affiliate manager at SiteSell participate regularly.
My 5 Star Affiliate Blog is #1 in all the search engines and has won awards and everything. Still my forum traffic is starting to beat out my blog.
I don’t quite understand it, but I think that forums were the 1st way have a community and some people still find forums more interactive and helpful than blog conversations I guess. Plus now that the latest version of Vbulletin, which I recently upgraded to, has RSS feeds, pingbacks and trackbacks some forums are moving into Web 2.0.
Linda, thanks for your comment. I have read your blog but haven’t delved too much into the forums.
I will have to check them out again.