By $5 Submissions aka Gene of
http://www.webmasterlabor.com Outsourced solutions for Today?s online entrepreneur.
All these articles are archived at
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Not until recently, a message board poster?s methods of generating revenue either involved a) posting offers or deals on webmaster boards for direct transactions or b) flying a linked graphical button or text links on one?s signature. The latter almost always consisted of either the poster?s content provider shop, design shop, or your standard webmaster referral program.
With the advent of high traffic adult webmaster chatboards like GFY, a new revenue model appeared for webmasters and/or avid board watchers/participants. This new model revolves around personally selling (either directly, through a broker or through outsource companies) one?s signature space or Sigs. Publicly, these are often sold in blocks of time similar to renting billboard space. Privately, this advertising form can revolve around a guaranteed number of posts for a block of time (usually monthly).
Old strategies ? New impact
Sig promotions? guiding philosophy is not different at all from the general aims of advertising: generating direct sales or building a brand identity. These often involve differing measures of success for a particular Sig promotion campaign. To sponsors who require direct and concrete results, sig campaigns are measured in terms of affiliate sign ups. To sponsors wishing to build brand recognition, Sig campaigns are measured in terms of banner impressions. Regardless of metric used, the number of clicks a Sig generates information an advertising campaign manager can take into consideration in determining success.
One helpful tool in keeping track of the metrics above is AdultGods.Com?s Sig Monkey signature tracking system. You can download a copy by visiting:
http://adultgods.com/sigmonkey.php This helpful tool keeps track of Sig views, sig clicks, and calculates a view to click ratio.
While Sig promotions gives webmasters a new way of making money, there are quite a few webmasters who lament this recent development since, in their view, it devaluates the value of Sigs. Sigs originally were a great way to keep track of what other webmasters are doing, hear of new programs, and basically be updated about the latest trends and technologies in the industry. With the rise of PAID Sigs, a few webmasters complain that Sigs now reflect not necessarily what?s new or exciting about the industry but which sponsors have the funds to buy a campaign. In essence, the natural diversity of signatures has greatly diminished.
Another common complaint about the paid Sig system is the quality of posts by webmasters who post for sig views (derisively called ?SigWhores?) tend to be very low because a) of pure volume or b) shock value. Many paid posters just post for sheer volume to create an IMMERSIVE branding effect. This is not too different from driving along a short stretch of highway with massive billboards advertising the same product ever 500 meters. This approach seeks to build brand identity and recognition.
Other paid posters post for shock value. While they post less, the threads they create are quite eye-catching or preys on psychological triggers that they generate massive responses. Subjects involving one country?s superiority over others, ethnic pride, ethnic or religious divisions, sexual problems, or personal judgments rank among the most common ways of creating threads that have ?eyeball catching? value. Other variations of selective posting are posting jokes, interesting/quirky news, or personal stories.
One thing is for sure, with the rise of Sig posters, chatboards such as GFY experience heavier page views. The name of the game has now focused on catching as many eyeballs as possible. Whether through VOLUME posting or SELECTIVE (aka Shock) posting.
Spam Redux:
Many critics of ?sig whores? would just say that they are not much better than spammers. However, there?s 2 ways to become a Sig whore?an obvious one or a creative one.
The bottomline, like with spam, is not be so obvious.
Obvious sig whoring would be to just crank up your posts without paying much attention to the topic of the conversation or the development of the thread. Other ways of obvious sig whoring are posting obviously incendiary threads crafted to get an ?emotional rise? out of readers. This generates quite a lot of eyeballs but also a lot of criticism.
Some Creative topics/methods of posting that can avoid many of the more common complaints against Sigwhoring.
1) Tag team posting: 1 user posts question, another posts "answer.? One variation of this is the artificial piss match.
2) Long term poster aka BRAND poster: a person posts for a long period of time and has a track record of posting informative/helpful or just plain funny/entertaining posts.
This establishes a BRAND and many board readers naturally gravitate towards his posts. Examples: (informative) KRL, (entertaining) Juicylinks, and (provocative) Dark Jedi.
3) "Standards" poster: this person posts a list of quality control items re paysite design or traffic generation?establishes expertise and some sort of credibility. Great for targeted sig marketing (ie., graphics standards posters = design shop sig.)
Bottomline: as long as your sigwhoring is subtle, meets a psychological need of the reader [entertainment, venting, aesthetics, etc], and generates eyeballs without generating too much complaints, you are accomplishing your objective.
