Its the ultimate forum showdown! BlackHatWorld vs TrafficPlanet vs WarriorForum!
Since I launched the site I have engaged my audience directly by posting on these 3 forums.
They have sent me a bunch of traffic this year so I wanted to see which one was best!
The results of the previous JohnChow.com vs SearchEngineJournal.com battle were pretty interesting.
But which is the best internet marketing & blackhat forum for traffic & conversions?
What Will I Learn?
To find out which is the best internet marketing forum I’m going to run them through a series of tests to determine which one offers the most bang for buck in terms of traffic and conversion.
All 3 internet marketing forums operate in similar but slightly different niches, so it will be interesting to see how each audience responds to the site.
Let’s start with traffic & engagement.
A simple test, which internet marketing forum offers the best pages/visit, average visit duration and bounce rate?
Site | Visits | Pages/visit | Visit Duration | % New Visits | Bounce Rate |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BlackHatworld | 6,875 | 2.69 | 05:26 | 43.52% | 48.32% |
TrafficPlanet | 3,693 | 2.74 | 06:14 | 29.65% | 45.95% |
WarriorForum | 3,965 | 2.84 | 06:40 | 48.93% | 46.61% |
This makes for some interesting observations!
First of all it is clear that traffic from WarriorForum is more engaged than anywhere else. They visit more pages and stick around for longer!
While people from BlackHatWorld tend to stick around for over a minute less visiting the least amount of pages.
TrafficPlanet sits in the happy medium but only sends 29.65% new visitors.
This is because it’s a smaller tightly knit community I’m deeply engaged in – nice to know they still want to hear what I have to say though =D
So now we know how engaged the traffic is with the blog, but what about conversion?
Things like email subscriptions, affiliate clicks or resource downloads which require a social share.
Well luckily I have all the data for that ready to rock!
Site | Goal Conversion | Email Subscription | Affilaite Click | Resource Download |
---|---|---|---|---|
BlackHatworld | 15.07% | 0.76% | 8.10% | 1.99% |
TrafficPlanet | 13.24% | 0.95% | 6.77% | 1.44% |
WarriorForum | 14.55% | 1.34% | 8.17% | 1.11% |
Percentages are all well & good but let’s take a look at how they actually translates into numbers-
Site | Goal Conversions | Email Subscriptions | Affilaite Clicks | Resource Downloads |
---|---|---|---|---|
BlackHatworld | 746 | 52 | 557 | 137 |
TrafficPlanet | 338 | 35 | 250 | 53 |
WarriorForum | 421 | 53 | 324 | 44 |
What is worth noting is they all offer similar overall goal conversion rates of 13.24%-15.07%.
But how this breaks down is interesting.
People coming from BlackHatWorld (which is truly the best blackhat forum) tend to click on a lot of affiliate links & love getting the free resources which require a social share, but don’t tend to opt in.
Whilst people coming from WarriorForum also like to click affiliate links but are more likely to subscribe via email than download the free resources.
There is a key difference in behaviour here.
I believe this is due to people coming from WarriorForum are pre-conditioned to ‘opt in’ to things to get freebies via the WSO forum.
Whereas people coming from BlackHatWorld are used to getting direct links to free things with no opt-in, they have a dedicated forum for it!
So naturally WarriorForum traffic is looking for the opt in and BlackHatWorld traffic is looking for the download link.
TrafficPlanet cruises at a happy medium where it is much more laid back without the incentive to opt in to get things or grab freebies.
The last thing I want to take a look at is how much time was invested to generate the traffic & conversions from each internet marketing forum.
To do that I’m going to look at the total number of posts made on each forum over the same time period-
Site | # Of Posts | Visits Per Post | Email Subs Per Post | Aff Clicks Per Post | Resource D/Ls Per Post |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BlackHatworld | 398 | 17 | 0.13 | 1.40 | 0.34 |
TrafficPlanet | 406 | 9 | 0.09 | 0.62 | 0.34 |
WarriorForum | 189 | 21 | 0.28 | 1.71 | 0.23 |
When we look at the number of posts made compared to what they actually generated things get pretty awkward.
I’ve made my thoughts clear about how the admins run the WarriorForum, so having them provide the best performing traffic isn’t ideal 😛
It is by far the best ‘value’ traffic though offering more visits, subscribers & affiliate clicks per post than any other – by quite a margin!
BlackHatWorld slides into second delivering slightly less traffic and affiliate clicks but a huge drop off in email subscriptions per post.
I actually have dedicated threads for my tutorials on BlackHatWorld that have had around 50,000 views in total compared to WarriorForum where they delete my threads and I just use a signature.
Even with those chips down – WarriorForum still seems to offer the best bang for buck!
TrafficPlanet is the worst performing all round but on the whole is a much much smaller forum with a tightly knitted community where everyone knows each other.
A local place for local people type thing ^^
There are a few key observations here specifically between how BlackHatWorld & WarriorForum traffic behaves once it hits the site.
First of all there is what I mentioned earlier about BlackHatWorld users used to getting things free via direct links whereas WarriorFourm traffic is preconditioned to the opt in first then get freebie nature of the WSO forum.
The other big observation is that WarriorForum offered more visitors and conversions per post than any other forum.
This is specifically interesting because on WarriorForum I just use signature links whereas on BlackHatWorld I have dedicated posts for my tutorials with ~50k views.
You would expect BlackHatWorld to at least send more visits per post on that basis, but that isn’t the case.
I think there are 2 reasons behind this-
So when a WarriorForum user hits my site they not only want to learn but are probably amazed at the value that is getting delivered to them upfront with no bullshit.
They are preconditioned to low quality products/flakey information due to the sheer volume of spammy WSO’s made by inexperienced pretenders.
Whereas the BlackHatWorld user has broken free of that and is well on their way to making money – a slightly more experienced user.
TrafficPlanet users tend to be more experienced/knowledgeable and it’s a much smaller community.
These guys are switched onto all of the tricks of the trade which and have become conditioned to ignore signature links & signing up for things due to past experiences on other forums.
What do you think? Have I jumped to the wrong conclusions?
Screenshots of the data in analytics are available here & here.
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Great article to help me understand in details about those forum.
Glad it was helpful
Blackhatworld is one of the forum sites where you can learn more about earning money as well as the best platform to get the backlinks. I am using blackhatworld since 2011. So I believe it’s really best.
That really amazing for newbies like me.
Hey, please optimize the post for mobile view. Not able to read complete paragraph.Thank you.
Thanks for letting me know! I’ll fix the issue as soon as possible!
BHW is the best
Really High-value forum you have shared with us. Thank you, guys.
Happy to help
Thanks for all great knowledge. Personally it’s really help me.
Awesome news Hemant!
same to you.
high quality information thanks
No problem Lincoln
The whole story was useful thanks
You’re welcome 🙂
thanks for sharing good information
No worries David! Hope to see you again soon.
Many thanks to MatthewWoodward.co.uk for giving us this well written masterpiece. It assisted my team well enough to drive the right energy into the right channel for a free ads promotion website called http://www.forumine.comKeep up the good work
Hi Charles, glad to have helped the team 🙂
Brilliant article and equally brilliant comments! I’ve dabbled with BHW and Warrior forum over the last 5 ish years, but never been deeply embroiled, stuck to lurking and scooping up the freebies! In the offline world there are still people peddling ‘multi-level marketing’ schemes (used to be called pyramid schemes, because only the guys & gals who got in early were ever going to make any $!) Just mention this ‘cos that’s what WF reminds me of – BHW is more of a free-for -all .
Thanks Moova
thanks
no worries
thanks,,,,
no problem
thanks
no worries
thanks info
no problem at all
To be frank i read the comments for info and they were more interesting than the whole article i read. You were right your site just like an active community. .Thanks for giving the honest review, explaining the diff between shit and BHW.
No problem Rana 🙂
I like BHW . But next days i’ll be busy with TP and matthewwoodward.co.uk 🙂
Haha thanks 🙂
It is a short post however it retains the usual quality. Thanks Mateo for existing I follow him from Colombia. And I already said it
Gracias amigo!
We all have a point of view; a relative viewpoint; a personal truth or opinion that matters; and, is of great value…to someone! I like BHW and NOT for the obvious reasons; it is a much freer forum, and not, centered exclusively on scamming its naive subscribers. Although, in recent years, I’ve also witnessed an increase in some dubious and unquestionable offers on BHW as well. After a decade of research about Internet Marketing, I’ve come to the following inescapable conclusions….Yes, after reviewing the validity of ‘millions’ of online offers.I have this to say to all the Internet Marketing newbies out there….There is a furious battle raging. It is fuelled by the need for greed. And, to the victor go the spoils. What’s really at stake within this present day Internet Marketing Mania? Simply, trillions of dollars, and billions of lives.We (Internet Users) are over 3.2 billion today! That’s a huge potential market almost half the Worlds population, just waiting to be grabbed! It’s an absolute opportunistic feeding frenzy; a crusade for POWER. Believe me when I say, that ‘those in the know’, have already been working very hard, behind the scenes, recruiting every Internet newbie soul that is willing to sell their soul, for the God Almighty Dollar!Tens of thousands of mindless minions are being unsuspectingly recruited even as you read these words. Millions of subscriber lists have already been accumulated. As an internet newbie, for you, the War has begun; you were just too distracted, to deceived, and too confused, to see it happening. Or, to see it coming straight for you! Mathew, thanks for always being a straight shooter and delivering quality goods. You hooked me for life with your first blog. Keep up the good work!
You can find dubious products and services in nearly any niche that you can think of, whether its digital or physical.However in the IM world people often take advantage of the mindset of people that want to better their lives but without working hard for it and you would be surprised how many people throw common sense out of the window in pursuit of buying a dream.Always remember, there is no substitute for hard work. There wasn’t 100 years ago and there won’t be 100 years from now.
Don’t get me wrong, there is an awful lot of junk on both forums – but there are also lots of knowledgeable people that share some awesome golden nuggets!
Perhaps I am being a little cynical Matthew! If you say there is good information there then I accept that, I will give it another look 🙂 We need all the good guys to maybe form an alternative to what is out there, I’m certain it would be popular..food for thought.
Blackhat world is populated by those who think there is a magic hack for everything, the attitude there is almost completely opposite to the ambition for building a sustainable, ethical business – people who do not have the patience, or skills to persist (I can feel the flames from here) The Warrior Forum is exasperating, it is like a Purgatory where the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the tortured souls is deafening, and the same questions get asked every day 🙂 For the sincere operator there is no ‘good’ forum currently available, they are all like dentist waiting rooms! Which is why blogs such as yours are a blessing Matthew.
Thanks Michael 🙂 Although I like the sentiment of both forums as there is always more than 1 way to skin a cat.When I attended the BHW conference there was a high high high level of SEO knowledge on display
Ohhhh I see, you should just attend the next conference and bribe them with alcohol 😛
Without reading forum rules I posted a Giveaway 100 free .xyz domains to users. To do so they need to registered on my site, so I could make it free. In that process user need to provide mail I’d, which is not allowed on BHW. after 25 domains my accn with BHW banned. I requested them many times, but told II broke the terms and rules and can’t be unbanned. But its seems to be good rule is rule. Hoping to get my accn back in future