Generating traffic to your website is an important topic. Without traffic, your online presence would be for naught. You’ve heard of the paradox, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did the tree really fall?” The equivalent paradox online is, “If you have a website and got no visitors, then do you really have a website?”

Luckily, there are many ways to generate traffic to your website. Here is a quick list: blog, publish articles, submit press releases, create feeder sites on Hubpages, Quizilla and Wetpaint, comment on blogs, comment in forums, run eBay ads, post ads in newspapers, run pay-per-click, run content ads, run cost-per-view, create a free software download, create an iPhone application, post on billboards, post in ezines, rent a mailing list, call people, post jobs, post on Yahoo answers, join syndicates, and social bookmark.

Whew. How long do you think it’ll take to go through that partial list of traffic generating strategy? So where should we start. Since the focus of this blog post is on being social, let’s talk about social bookmarking.

In the old days, which was two years ago in internet time, people bookmarked cool sites using the bookmark feature of their browser. The problem was that the bookmarks were trapped on one computer. If they used another computer, say at the library, they wouldn’t be able to access their bookmarks. Bummer. The other problem was that their friends couldn’t access their bookmarks either … “If you bookmarked a really cool site, and nobody else knew about it, was it really a cool site?”

Then one day, smart internet-types decided to liberate the bookmarks that were trapped in people’s computers. Thus was born the age of the internet bookmarks. Sites like Clipmarks, Delicious, Magnolia, Faves, Mr. Wong, Furl, Reddit, and a hundred others popped up like mushrooms. A good idea doesn’t stay lonely for long.

This was also the beginning of a brand new way of getting traffic to your website. If you have a cool website or a cool article or a cool tool on your website, people will bookmark it and share it with their friends who will share it with their friends and so on. Eventually, your coolness will be validated across the internet. And that is how you will get traffic.

Does it work? Yes and no. If you do have good content, people will find you via bookmarks. I launched a site about a month ago with some good content. Within two weeks, I had 1,800 visitors via bookmarking. That was an example of a site with cool content. Another site I launched didn’t get as many visitors. In fact, it got far less at only 25 uniques a day. Clearly, the latter site was not cool.

So there you have it. If you want traffic, create cool content, bookmark your content, be social, and watch the flood of unique visitors come to your website.

By the way, bookmarking can be a time-consuming process. Here are two aggregate bookmarking sites that can save you time:

* www.socialmarker.com

* www.socialposter.com