There are a lot of ways to boost your business online. Different internet marketing strategies and SEO are developed to increase traffic and gain back links. With the evolution of the internet, old ways of generating back links like may seem obsolete yet they are still effective. One of the early ways of building links over the internet is through forum posting.

Forum posting is fun and educational way of getting links. Using forum posting does not only give you additional links to your site but also increases your reputation. Backlinks are gained through the signature that appears on every post that you make and your reputation is increased for the good content that you post.

A forum can either be public or private. Public forums are forums where anyone can join. Usually, public forums are free and topics are searchable. This is where most internet business owners join. This is also the kind of forums that has high volumes of spammers. You need to very careful in choosing which forum to join. Choose the forum where you can see that the moderators are active.

Private forums on the other hand, are forums that are accessible to a certain group. This type of forum is usually paid forums or are communities of an internet business site. The information here are more reliable compared to free forum information. Generally, posts on this forum are not crawled by search engine and are not displayed on search results.

No matter what type of forum you are here are some things that you need to remember when joining forums.

1. Update your profile information. You need to fill in the information on your profile so that people who would want to know you will be able to know how to contact you. Most forum allows you to put your home page on your profile. Although it is good to give out information about you, it would be safe not to give out personal numbers, emails and address as well as your real birthday. You have to set up a public email. You wouldn’t want your personal email to receive spam.

2. Update your Avatar and Profile Picture. Avatar for forums is limited to 80 pixels and profile photo are a little bit higher than that. Choose a photo that looks professional.

3. Update your Signature. There are forums that do not allow new members to have signature. Some forums require at least 10 post before a member is allowed to have a signature. When adding your signature, make sure that your link works. Preview your link first before submitting.

4. Introduce yourself. Most forums have a thread for Introductions and this is the first place that you would want to post to let people know that you’re in the community. Never make an introduction that is short as "Hi. New here." It is best to give out information of your name, where you are located, what you do, what you expect from the forum and how you found out about the forum.

5. Post valuable information. Nobody wants to read information that are garbage.

6. Be courteous. Say thank you when your question were answered or you get help from people.

Whatever is your intention on joining a forum, keep in mind that moderators can get you blacklisted if you abuse your account.