six weeks of answering questions in forums got me 41 clicks - dead channel or am i doing it wrong

40 hours for 3 signups is only bad if your time has a better alternative use, and at zero audience and zero budget most channels are worse. But I'd change one thing: 60 answers in six weeks is ten a week, which is a lot of shallow answers.

I'd rather write two long ones a week that become the reference answer for a specific question and get linked by other people. Depth is what gets found later. Volume just gets buried.

It's slow, and it's also not really a click channel. The value isn't the 41 people who clicked this month, it's that in a year there are 60 answers with your name on them that keep getting found, and that people in that community recognise you. I got a customer from a comment I'd written fourteen months earlier.

The mistake is measuring it weekly against paid channels. Measure at six months, and only do it if you can stand it - if you're forcing yourself it shows, and then it doesn't work at all.

Disagreeing with the no-linking rule. Not linking is a slightly performative kind of honesty that mostly costs you. If someone asks how to do X and you built a thing that does X, saying so in one sentence at the end, clearly marked as yours, is what people actually want.

The rule that matters is that the answer has to be complete without the link. They should be able to solve it themselves from what you wrote. Do that and nobody has ever complained at me.

Started this in February. What changed my numbers was tracking which specific questions the clicks came from - added a source parameter to the link in my profile and then noticed that essentially all my traffic came from two threads about one narrow problem, and none from the general 'what tools do you use' threads I was spending most evenings on.

Stopped answering the general ones. Same hours, and clicks roughly tripled over the next month.

Answer questions that are older than a month. Nobody competes for those and search doesn't care when you wrote it.

Also worth going where the question is being asked badly. If somebody posted a confused version of the problem with no answers, a clear answer there will eventually be the thing people find, because it's the only one.