Communities, including forums and question & answer websites, are an absolute godsend for affiliate marketers. If you use these sites correctly, then you can gain a lot of traction with your affiliate marketing. On this page, we want to share with you a few different methods for this. We really are going to teach you how to do affiliate marketing using forums.

Some brief notes

Before we start sharing the methods for how to do affiliate marketing using forums, we want to point out that the information on this page will require you to have your own website. We are not really going to be talking about sharing affiliate links on forums directly. This will result in a short, sharp ban. This means that these methods are not necessarily the quickest methods for making money using forums like Quora, but they are going to be some of the most sustainable.

Why you need sites like Quora

It is a ready-made community. You could start affiliate marketing today, and you could reach your target market in mere seconds. No other method is faster. Not only that, but more often than not, questions asked online will have a Quora answer. This will almost always be the top result on Google. If your link is there, you will have essentially ‘hijacked’ the top spot of the searches without putting in more effort than writing a quality response to a question.

Share links to your website

When it comes to how to do affiliate marketing using forums, this is probably the simplest method. You hang around sites like Quora and forums in your niche. You answer questions. You provide a link to your website. It is a particularly crude method, but if you prove that you are a viable member of the community then it is likely that your links will be allowed. Just make sure that you do a little bit more than advertising. If you become known as somebody that just spams advertising everywhere, then you will be ruining the reputation of your website.

Let’s say you are marketing yourself on Quora. You would answer a question, give a substantial answer. Nothing less than a few paragraphs. Then include a link to your website as a source. You may want to include a few other sources to make it seem less suspicious, though (and far, far more authoritative!)

Remember; most forums will be ‘no follow’ links, so you can’t really work with them for search engine optimization. Although, you may stumble across some major sites which do have ”do follow’ links. Obviously, make sure that they are relevant to your niche, or you will be doing yourself more harm than good.

Increase authority

One of the wonderful things about Quora is that you can write yourself a nice little profile page. You can also give yourself ‘qualifications’ on it. If you are active and well-known for making quality answers, on Quora, then people will visit your profile. They will see the links you have posted there, and they will head on over to your website. Remember; half of the battle in affiliate marketing is building up trust. People are only going to purchase from you if you make it seem like you know what you are talking about.

We think that the best solution on sites like Quora is to use either your real name or a made-up persona for your website. Don’t use a random nickname. It is not good for building up your brand. You can then confine yourself to answering only a certain type of question. The more you answer, the more you will find that the Quora community will start to respect you. It will be a slow process, but we promise that doing that will increase the number of clicks you have going through to your website.

‘Steal’ questions

Alright. We don’t necessarily mean that you should be physically lifting content from sites like Quora. We do mean that you should be looking to Quora in order to find content for your website.

If you head on Quora, then it is likely that you will see the same questions being asked repeatedly. If the same questions are being asked all the time, then it means it is a popular topic. It means that you should be writing about it on your website. If you do your keyword research, then you should be able to rank pretty well for the content. Obviously, you won’t be able to compete with the ‘big guns’ in your niche, but at least you will be able to create some content that will probably get searched for with long-tail keywords.

This means that you will not constantly need to be tracking down new content for your site. You have ready-made ideas for your content. Hundreds per day. It will all loop back around too. If you write content that answers some of the most popular questions on forums and Quora, then you will be able to link it as a source when you are answering questions. Two benefits for the price of one!

Obviously, these ideas are just scratching the surface with what you can do when it comes to affiliate marketing on Quora and forums, but if you put these ideas into practice, and you regularly work on your profile, you will see benefits when it comes to your affiliate income.