The Tom Sawyer Trick Online

Whether your Web site generates advertising revenue or serves as a vehicle to promote your own products or affiliate products, there is usually a fairly direct correlation between traffic to your Web site and the success of your business. What you want is more visitors to come to your site more often and read more pages of your site, right?

But how do you keep people coming back over and over, and not only that, but inviting their friends to your site?

The answer, says Erick Schonfeld, is to do The Tom Sawyer Trick Online. Tom Sawyer, as you may recall, managed to get all of his friends to paint the fence that he was supposed to be painting by cleverly convincing them that it wasn't really work, but a lot of fun. Online, this takes the form of user-generated content, which companies like eBay and Amazon have been building successful businesses around for years. Now startups like EVDB.com, TravelPost.com and Trumba are hoping to capitalize on people's seemingly unending fascination with themselves.

What does this mean for your business? Think about it -- what could you do to add user-generated content to your website? Discussion forums? Blogs which readers can post comments on? Product or service reviews and recommendations? You don't have to create the next eBay or Amazon -- there are simple applications for many of these readily available and easily integrated into your site. More content, freshly updated by your visitors and customers, means more new and repeat visitors to your site, and that will hit on your bottom line. Do it right, and they may not even notice that in the process, they're doing your work for you!