Using Affiliates on Your Forum

[📚 Dianne 📚]

I know I'm a little late jumping in here, but I just started using affiliates. I've read all the posts here and have yet to see someone discuss the merits of affiliating with non-ProBoards sites. I realize that for some you need to be ad-free, but there are a LOT of places out there that have tie-ins with many different kinds of boards.

My board happens to be about books and discussions that arise from that, so I was able to come up with many affiliates that pertain to writing and reading. I've yet to affiliate to most of them, (they affiliate to me)but my understanding was that a good board owner makes it a pleasant place for their posters, and that would mean doing everything you
can to make your board unique. (And not just with skins and such)For example if you are a RPG site why not affiliate with a company that makes comupters or games or one that deals with graphic comics and Manga?

A gardening board? Perhaps a company that sells seeds and stuff.

You don't have to do this to make money, just do it to make your board different and fun and helpful at the same time.
I wrong or is there an undercurrent that I am missing here?

[Gamoc]

cats57 said:

I know I'm a little late jumping in here, but I just started using affiliates. I've read all the posts here and have yet to see someone discuss the merits of affiliating with non-ProBoards sites. I realize that for some you need to be ad-free, but there are a LOT of places out there that have tie-ins with many different kinds of boards.

My board happens to be about books and discussions that arise from that, so I was able to come up with many affiliates that pertain to writing and reading. I've yet to affiliate to most of them, (they affiliate to me)but my understanding was that a good board owner makes it a pleasant place for their posters, and that would mean doing everything you
can to make your board unique. (And not just with skins and such)For example if you are a RPG site why not affiliate with a company that makes comupters or games or one that deals with graphic comics and Manga?

A gardening board? Perhaps a company that sells seeds and stuff.

You don't have to do this to make money, just do it to make your board different and fun and helpful at the same time.
I wrong or is there an undercurrent that I am missing here?

No, you gave a very great idea here. You are very true. I don't always affiliate with ProBoards Sites, although that is what I mostly do, it is a great idea to affiliate with non ProBoards Sites. In fact, that could actually get you an even wider variety of members, especially since they have some helpful links that they can click everyone once in a while.

[📚 Dianne 📚]

pikablu said:

No, you gave a very great idea here. You are very true. I don't always affiliate with ProBoards Sites, although that is what I mostly do, it is a great idea to affiliate with non ProBoards Sites. In fact, that could actually get you an even wider variety of members, especially since they have some helpful links that they can click everyone once in a while.

Thanks, that was exactly the point I was trying to make, I just did it using too many words! LOL!

I go around and check out so many boards and think to myself WOW, great boards, but I wish they would add some links that pertained to what their board was all about.

[Gamoc]

cats57 said:

pikablu said:

No, you gave a very great idea here. You are very true. I don't always affiliate with ProBoards Sites, although that is what I mostly do, it is a great idea to affiliate with non ProBoards Sites. In fact, that could actually get you an even wider variety of members, especially since they have some helpful links that they can click everyone once in a while.

Thanks, that was exactly the point I was trying to make, I just did it using too many words! LOL!

I go around and check out so many boards and think to myself WOW, great boards, but I wish they would add some links that pertained to what their board was all about.

No, you were fine. It is true sometimes. Some boards do need links to things that pertain to what they are talking about in their affiliates, but not always. Some of them it is hard to, like Pokemon RPGs, the best places with information do not always have affiliate links, which, in turn, gives them not affiliate for them to use. That is why I originally created my site, so that I could post information that people could link back to, because some of the big sites that have awesome information are hell to affiliate with.

[kandykissesxoxo]

Jan 12, 2006 8:13:40 GMT -8 ĐR said:

The use of affiliates or the act of affiliating is something that is tossed around quite often here on ProBoards Support. Although most regulars already know what affiliation is, many new people have no clue what it is all about. First off let's define affiliation as it applies to ProBoards.

Affiliation - The reciprocal exchange of links between ProBoards forum owners, usually in the form of a small banner which is displayed in a table on the board's main page, used in an effort to generate traffic between forums.

Affiliation is very important in generating traffic. As discussed in this thread the more links on other web sites and forums to your forum, the more traffic you are likely to generate. The more traffic you generate the better chance you have of someone joining your forum. That is where affiliation comes in.

Now that we've covered what affiliation is in relation to ProBoards we can discuss how to go about setting up an affiliates table for your forum. Before we proceed let's take a moment to look at the "small banner" (usually referred to as a mini-banner). This mini-banner is a small image that when clicked will take the viewer to your forum. Here is an example of the mini-banner:



Most mini-banners are 88 pixels in width and 31 pixels in height. Although they can be wider and higher, 88x31 is the norm. It is generally essential that you have a mini-banner in order to affiliate with other forums. If you don't have the capability of making one yourself, you can always request one at the graphics request board. Now once you’ve gotten your mini-banner you’ll need to host it. There are a variety of free image hosts out there including imageshack.us and photobucket.com. These image hosts will provide you with a direct link to the mini-banner. The use of these mini-banners will require being able to understand a little HTML. Don't panic as this is very basic. Here is an example of THE HTML for an affiliate code and a breakdown of what it means:

<a href="LINK TO THE FORUM" target="_blank"><img src="LINK TO THE MINI-BANNER" border="0" alt="ProBoards Support" /></a>

-This is where the link to the forum will go.

-This is where the link to the mini-banner will go. Given to you by your image host.

-This is where the board’s name will go.

Once you’ve gotten your mini-banner and have your affiliates code ready it’s time to find some boards to affiliate with. So how do you go about doing this? Well, it’s quite simple. First I’d start off by taking a look at the Get Opinions About Your Board forum here and having a look through some of the boards that are posted there. If you like a particular forum and are interested in affiliating send them a PM here and request to affiliate with them. Most people are more than happy to affiliate with other forum owners. If you do this make sure that you don’t post in their rating thread asking to affiliate with them. Keep affiliate requests here at ProBoards Support to PM only. One other method is to use Google to search for forums. Just go to Google and type in your interest and Proboards. So let’s say you wanted to find a board on pets to affiliate with. Go to Google and search for it like this:

Pets proboards

Chances are you’ll find tons of pet forums many of which will have affiliate tables and methods to contact the forum owners to affiliate.

Okay so you’ve gotten a few other forum owners willing to affiliate now what? The next step is to get an affiliate table to place on your forum. The one below taken from the ProBoards Frequently Asked Questions thread is a good one to use. I have modified it just a bit. You should place this code in your main page footers area. I’ve included it below as well as a breakdown of how to use it:


<table align="center" border="0" width="92%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="bordercolor">
<tr>
<td>
<table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="1" border="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td class="titlebg" align="center" colspan="3">
<font color="FFFFFF" size="2">
<b><center>Affiliates</font></center></b>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</td>
<td width="70%" class="windowbg2" align="center">
<!-- Begin Mini Banners -->
<P>
<marquee height="50" width="700" onmouseover="this.stop()" onmouseout="this.start()" direction="left" scrollamount="3");"><font face="verdana" color="#000000">

<center>



<a href="URL OF SITE" Target="_blank">
<img src="URL OF BANNER" width=88 height=31 border=0 alt="BANNER NAME"></a>


</center></font></marquee>

<!-- End Mini Banners -->
</td>
<td width="30%" align="center" class="windowbg">
<img src="URL OF YOUR BANNER"> <textarea rows="2" name="S1" cols="20">THE HTML CODE FOR YOUR BANNER</textarea></form>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>


- This is where you’ll place your affiliates’ HTML codes. This will cause their mini-banners to display in the table and scroll across in the table. To add multiple affiliates simply place the affiliate codes after one another in that area.

- This is where you’ll insert the url to your mini-banner given to you by your image host.

- This is where you’ll put the entire HTML code for your own forum. This will appear in a textbox under your mini-banner so that other members can copy and paste it to use.

To see this in action you can take a look at this for an example:

afftest.proboards78.com/index.cgi

Of course, the example above is to give you a general idea of how the affiliates table works. Note that in the example above the mini-banner that scrolls is the same as the one that appears in the left area above the textbox. The scrolling area would be where your affiliates would be listed.

Now once you’ve gotten your own mini-banner and affiliates code, you’ve picked up some other forum owners to affiliate with, and you have your table ready you should be set. Here are a few tips on affiliation to help you out:

- Only affiliate with those forum owners who are willing to reciprocate. In other words don’t put up someone else’s affiliate banner unless they are willing to display yours on their forum.

- Make a way for visitors to either request affiliation on your forum through a thread open for guests to post in or leave some way for them to contact you via email.

- Maintain your affiliates listing. Check on a weekly basis to make sure that all of your affiliates are still open and are still displaying your mini-banner. Remove those affiliates if their forum has closed completely, been deleted, or they are no longer displaying your mini-banner for some reason.

- Affiliate with a wide variety of forums. If you own a Harry Potter board don’t simply restrict your affiliating to other Harry Potter forums.


So now what are your thoughts on affiliation? Got any questions or concerns? Have something to add?

Thank you so much for the excellent directions. I wanted to do this but was so scared to even try. But with your excellent directions I was able to do it. I am a total newb to owning a board so this is exciting to me.

[nyaccent]

I have a couple of questions? If you no longer want to have an affialite on your board, let's say due to lack of growth....or a dying board..... and you want to remove them from your board.... Do you contact them and let them know you are removing them, so they in turn can remove you from their board?

Also I affiliate with others not only proboards boards.... To me it doesn't make a difference where the members come from... Is it better to affiliate with the same type of board you have.... like mine is a graphics site....so should I only affiliate with graphics sites or should I affiliate with other sites that may have a graphics need... Mostly the sites I am affialiate with are role playing sites...... I do have some graphic boards as affiliates too. But as far as I know, no generation of membership has come from the affiliates, except the owners of the forums... I have gotten a few of them as members.

[sergeim]

how can i get one on my forum? sergeim.proboards107.com/index.cgi?

I just need the code for the Affiliate Box though. help me thankes

[Kiba]

I like affiliation because it allows more traffic into my forums and it allows more traffic to the forum I'm affiliating with. But I try to limit myself to a set number of affiliations so my site doesn't take a long time to load up. ^_^

[An Error Has Occured]

I don't really have afflaites on my main page. I keep them to my afflaite board. So if people want to look at them, they can go there. Not just popped up everywhere.

[nyaccent]

Jul 8, 2008 16:05:42 GMT -8 sergeim said:

how can i get one on my forum? sergeim.proboards107.com/index.cgi?

I just need the code for the Affiliate Box though. help me thankes

The code for the affiliation box can be found here in he first post or in post #50.

[moonshade]

hi. sorry if wrong place to post.
i want a affiliate that like flashes to different images like:
(no advertising intended. it isnt mine )
just PM me the answer, that would be great!

[palebird]

I guess it depends on the forum really. As my forum is fairly new I only have four affiliates at the moment, but I'm sure as the forum grows we should get more affiliate requests.

I've also noticed on some forums that they allow guests to post links to their forum, I'm not sure if this is a good idea because it can produce a hell of a lot of spam on your forum, spam is not a great friend of mine.

Do you think its a good idea having the links area guest friendly, or do you keep the links forum only viewable to your members?

[:~:Sarapha:~:]

Affiliates never really worked for me. They're really hard to keep updated too, if you have a lot of them. Links break, codes disappear, or the site is deleted and you've got a mini-banner leading nowhere. Generally, I stick with Advertisements, they are a lot more informative.

[kelendria]

Jul 29, 2008 10:29:37 GMT -8 palebird said:

I guess it depends on the forum really. As my forum is fairly new I only have four affiliates at the moment, but I'm sure as the forum grows we should get more affiliate requests.

I've also noticed on some forums that they allow guests to post links to their forum, I'm not sure if this is a good idea because it can produce a hell of a lot of spam on your forum, spam is not a great friend of mine.

Do you think its a good idea having the links area guest friendly, or do you keep the links forum only viewable to your members?

For me personally I have my links viewable to guests, simply because I don't do main page affiliation.
Alot of people in the past have deleted me because they think I don't link them back. (I ALWAYS do)
I've had a horrible experience of having a links section on my forum.
I deleted it because as you said it produces a lot of spam.
Also people often join your forum just to post links & never come back again, or guests just spam their links, or spam other people's threads.
I've found affiliating still the most effective for me, I do text link affiliations, because of banners & things going offline.
It does get hard to check but I haven't got time to host everyone's buttons & banners.
I've tried all other sorts of advertising & found that word of mouth does absolutely nothing, though URL submissions & Googling works wonders!
It depends on the individuals tastes & needs

[Stinky666]

Don't affiliate with loads of forums at once.
Set your forum a maximum.
If you affiliate with too many forums and/or websites at once, you're not helping anyone out, and most of your affiliates wont benefit from them being on your page.
No one will wait to look through all your affiliates if you have many, even if you are using a scrolling table.

Keep an eye on your already existing affiliates.. Check up on their forum once every couple of weeks or every month, to make sure their activity and such is benefiting your forum/website. If it's not, remove their banner and allow for someone else to take their spot.


That's all I have to say on the matter. Hope it helps some people.