Forums are great way to generate much targeted smart visitors to your site, but you need to do it the right way. Users of forums are usually very smart people and good learners, that's what makes them end up in forums; to learn and ask questions, help and get help. If you can help them and offer them great information you can earn their trust and they may click on your signature and visit your site.

Forums are very niche targeted, you need to join your niche forums in order to be helpful, write and post specific information "tips, tricks and strategies on how to, where to and why". Know exactly how to attract their attention.

How to get clicks to your site from forums?

Join forums discussing your area of expertise. To be able to contribute, do not hesitate to give. You don't know every thing but you know something others don't know, you can learn from them and teach them in the same time, answer their questions and ask them.

Know who are the members of the forum? What kind of subject could interest them? For an example if you are in a forum of webmasters, that is all about building designing and promoting websites. You can get their attention when you offer special design tip or code, unique promotion strategy. Those members will be interested more of your experience than knowledge, you can steal their attention by posting something you have done and found it successful.

Do not insert affiliate links or links back to your website in the post itself, in most forums that considered as spam. You can insert a general links if you think it is helpful websites and related to your post.

Use anchor text in your signature, attractive but descriptive text to make users click on it. In the example above if you have a signature that says "Website designing tips" people will click, but be sure the link where it takes them does offer designing tips. Here you can use an affiliate links or specific page from your website.

Here is my own signature in one forum

Use forums for real traffic not link building. If you distribute correctly one article you can achieve more than 200 links (depend on how you distribute articles), on the other hand posting this article on the forum can give you only one link. So for link popularity use website directories, link exchange and articles distribution. Forums can give you great targeted and smart traffic; so use your time effectively.

Forums members are great but smart costumers, try to take them to a webpage that offer them products they may need. Recognize the potential products and offers that could interest the forum members. I had participated with website promotion forum, and one post made me great earning. My earnings were not money. I had post to the forum an article about article marketing strategy, and in the signature I used "Article directories list" where this signature takes them to one page of my website where I had arranged a list of 400 article directories.So the anchor text was "article directories list" that links to http://www.arabian-affiliate.com/Website-Directories.htm.

This post had more than 100 views and most of the members who read the post clicked on the signature, they not only visited my webpage they also bookmarked it. For me it is a huge success to make those very smart and unique visitors bookmark my website.

Last tip to you is: frequently change the signature and track the clicks. I am a member in a very powerful and useful forum called "Conquer Your Niche" and the "Warrior Forum" and there I change my signature and my links each month. Most of the warrior forum members are Plug-In-Profit-Site (PIPS) members, I am also, so I do not use the PIPS signature, and I change the signature all the time.