Tracking Subscribers from Forum Sigs?

Hey WahmJennie,

Your assertions are right on the money: especially this one: "As we all know, tracking is vitally important..."

Not wishing to be unhelpful, just the opposite I hope, but instead of sharing my stats I'll advise against using forum traffic in the conventional way to generate traffic. (I assume this is your interest in asking about stats.) I post on WF for fun. I include a sig only because it would be bad business not to do so. If you hope to generate a decent income from posting religiously on forums like WF, I'd suggest you look at other free sources of traffic instead, or think about using forums differently.

I'm sure this post runs the risk of not going down terribly well, but the truth is the truth. The time many of us spend posting on forums is, without question, able to deliver a higher ROI if we invest our time in other means of generating traffic. It's for this reason that I consider my time here play-time. Of course, play can also yield business relationships, advance your knowledge, and provide opportunities for helping people with free advice. Overall, though -- better traffic elsewhere.

It's true, change your mindset and start providing value. It's so much fun. You get an idea of what the market is going through and even discover different trends.

But to answer your question, use a self hosted tracker like my click boss, prosper202, quality click control or even a hosted tracker like click magik, trck.me. Make different tracker links to see where your traffic is coming from.

I track forum clicks religiously. It's actually quite fun to see what style remarks garner the highest quantity (and quality) of clicks.

At this time, I'm NOT advertising any squeeze pages, and as you can see am promoting my blog and a few of my products.



Not long ago, I WAS indeed promoting several squeeze pages, but decided to promote my products instead.

Regardless of what you decide, I can concur that you really get high quality traffic from the WarriorForum.

I hope this helps validate somebody's cause, or at least provide confirmation that the WarriorForum is truly a great source of free and targeted traffic.



I wish you the best.

I don't get "subscribers" from mine, because I have no opt-in there, but I do actually sometimes look (via my "Analytics" thingy) to see from which posts here visitors to my "painting-collection" have arrived. When I have nothing better to do, you understand.

Bit.ly would be a really bad one to use, Jen - partly because it's just unreliable and generally sucks, big time, but mostly (especially in this context) because there are so many people who just "won't click on bit.ly links" that it would probably cost quite a lot of traffic to use it: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe | :Ben Metcalfe Blog

.

I use Google Analytics to track all traffic sources and conversions (in your case subscription). My own tracking system provides more reliable results since my conversion is "Login with Facebook", the action (or event) that Google Analytics is not good at.

The conversion rate is 13% from forum signature links. I don't post often in any forums, but monitor forums with my own tool for the threads that I really know something and offer insights. Other traffic sources converts at 18%, and 35%.