3 Ways to Own More of the Internet

If you're like most webmasters you know that website traffic isn't always easy to come by. If you want to monetize your sites, you need to generate regular website traffic so you can develop an income from product sales, affiliate marketing, or selling ad space.

The smart way to generate a lot of regular, loyal visitors is to develop online destinations. These might be web properties that are communities and memberships of like-minded people who will return to your site again and again in order to interact with each other and also provide content for your site. You can also build a list of members so you can email them with news or remind them them to come back to visit your site again.

Let's look at a few ways you can easily create some of these online properties.

1. Perhaps the most common way to start an online community is to develop your very own discussion forum. All you need to get started is a web hosting account that includes free forum scripts such as PHPBB or SimpleMachines. These scripts can be installed from your hosting account automatically with just a few clicks and you can start posting content straight away. With a bit of promotion you can grow a membership of people who will contribute lots of content for you, and this content will in turn attract lots of free traffic from the search engines.

2. Video sharing communities. Imagine owning your own version of YouTube where visitors can post their own videos, or watch and comment on videos posted by other members. These type of sites are extremely popular and are suprisingly easy to create. Again you need a hosting account, preferably a type of hosting plan known as FFmpeg hosting which includes video encoding software on the web server. Fortnately these plans are no more expensive than regular hosting plans, and most of these FFmpeg plans also provide easy installation of video sharing site web scripts.

3. Another type of site to consider is your very own social bookmarking site such as Digg. You can can create a bookmarking site catering to your chosen topic to insure that the visitos and the content they post are suitable for your niche. These sites generate plenty of traffic and can be built using free scripts such as Pligg. Again your members will provide all the content you need.

These types of sites can be started out on cheap hosting plans, but if they become popular, and they certainly can, you will need to look into VPS web hosting which provides far more server resources for busy sites but costs much less than a dedicated server will. I hope this article has given you a few ideas for your next project.