[99SIVTEC]

Originally Posted by c.c.

Has anyone made any money yet?

Let me give you (and others a few tips). Most of my sales that were made during testing came from actual organic searches from search engines, not from the members of my own forum. I would start by promoting the feature on your site to your users. Mention that it is a way for them to help support your site since you earn a commission on every purchase. This goes a long way since members are often ready and willing to help support their favorite forum.

Next, get some organic traffic coming into the search pages. For this, you need to get some backlinks to some of the search result pages. This is as simple as displaying a few search url's in your signature on your forum, and encouraging your users to do that same.

We may also be able to create a side block that perhaps stores and shows the most popular searches? Doing this has the benefit of drawing attention to the search, but also gets some links in which helps get pages indexed and ultimately leads to sales.

Last but not least, be patient. It took me several weeks to start getting search traffic to my product search. After that, sales started to roll in slowly, and now I get several per day and have almost 7 million pages indexed. It went from my forum struggling to make money to being quite the money maker for me, but it took time .