I came across a good idea for bloggers or webmasters to increase traffic to their website. And it’s an idea I hadn’t heard about specifically before.

One of the more commonly known methods for promoting your blog or website is to be active in social networking forums. That means commenting–and making sure that your profile information includes the url for your website. And if you are able to complete more information in your profile–which will depend on the site you’re on–you and your company will come across as a lot more professional.

A Big Mistake

Unwise bloggers or webmasters may try to promote their website heavily–and selfishly–by visiting a plethora of different forums and making extremely brief comments for no other reason than to “get their name out there.”  Sometimes, they don’t even bother reading what the forum thread is about. Or they just throw in a generic comment that does little or nothing to add to the conversation. (But they’re always sure to drop in their website name.)

This kind of boldfaced self- promotion is generally a complete waste of time, because those in charge of accepting or rejecting comments will see thought this kind of scam in an instant. Posts like these are almost always filtered by moderators and deleted without ever seeing the light of day.

The Best Forums

When trying to increase traffic to your site by commenting in forums, be sure to:

1. Contribute highly relevant content
2. When choosing forums in which to participate, select sites that have visitors similar to those that would find your website most valuable
3. Visit forums that already draw high levels of traffic over forums of smaller sites

One of the most popular websites . . .

on the Internet today is Amazon.com. (According to Alexa.com, it currently ranks 16th in the world).When you sign up for an account with Amazon–which you must do when you first purchase something from their site–you’ll be able to set up a profile.

What I just recently realized is that Amazon generously provides a place to include your website address  in  your profile, which Amazon shoppers can view if they click on your profile link. Which they will be much more inspired to do if you write some reviews on Amazon products.

Just like your forum comments, any product reviews you write should provide extremely relevant and useful content. Remember–Amazon shoppers will be rating your reviews as to whether or not they are helpful, so make certain to put your best foot forward. The more popular your reviews, the more frequently other Amazon shoppers will likely read them in the future–the the more that happens, the more opportunity there will be for people to read about your website–which can, in turn, increase traffic to your site.

At first glance, depending on your website posting in your Amazon profile to increase traffic to your website may seem like a long-shot, not to mention a lot of work. But it’s part of the big picture–a single piece in the puzzle. And when you consider that people conduct about 37,200,000 global searches in Google each month for the term “Amazon” (as of November 2010), even a thin slice of this pie could be enough to feed you for a good, long while. 🙂