The explosion of community based websites such as Youtube.com has illustrated that user submitted content website is already popular but there will be a further explosion and growth in 2007 and beyond. One way to improve traffic flows to your website is to create ways for the ordinary users to be able to generate or submit content to your site. It also guarantees that there will always be something new on your website whether it is a fresh post by a user or a video upload, the website will never remain static.

In addition to this dynamic nature of your website it also takes a lot of the pressure associated with maintaining your website off you by allowing users to generate the content for you.

But how does someone cultivate a community on your site?

There are a number of techniques; some may be more successful than other.

1. Recognise your users who generate the most content for you.

Allow members of the general public to make comments on your website and track the individuals that make the most comments.

This offers your users facility to interact with each other and the author. Comments are one of the primary reasons why your users will frequent your website.

However comments should be tracked and top commentators recognised.

There are tools available that will automatically recognise your top commentators.

2. Be courteous

You cannot expect your users to do all the work for you.

Replay to as many comments as is possible and show gratitude and recognition to users, all of which are a sneaky way of creating more content by stimulating interaction between users.

3. Create a poll

Starting a poll on your website is one of the most basic ways of encouraging interaction your users and your site.

4. Reward your users

If your website is designed to make a profit, then it is only fair to reward some of your users.

Promotions and Give-Aways will increase the volume of traffic on your website and will also entice users to contribute better and more often thus benefiting the overall website and in turn your profits.

5. Encourage feedback

Find topics to write about for which you know your users will be interested in and quickly you will find that some radically different opinions will be formulated and some very interesting conversations will be instigated.

6. Start a forum on your site

A simple idea to improve the amount of content generated for your website is to create a forum to discuss the topics on and which revolve around topics on you website.

But BEWARE; forums can quickly be filled with inappropriate content i.e. spam and also it may not generate as much traffic as you would have hoped for your website.

However a properly moderated forum with proper spam filters could just be the perfect way to increase your website traffic.

7. Thread comments

Tools allow users the facility to reply to other users’ comments. Again this is an interesting way of creating more content by stimulating interaction between users.

8. Guest contributors

Guest articles and contributors are a fabulous way of giving users access to content that you may or may not be able to write about yourself.

It also eases the pressure placed on you to create content.