An online guest book is a log for people to sign and sometimes leave brief messages when they visit someone’s website.

Possibly you’ve posted to, or “signed” one of these guest books at one time when you’ve visited someone’s website.

Maybe you’ve encountered one of these guest books or a link to one and never taken the time to leave a brief introduction or comment about the website. Was it just laziness or didn’t you perceive any value in posting to the guest book?

Whatever the reason for not posting or not clicking on the link to the guest book here are five reasons why you should make posting to guestbooks a part of your marketing routine.

1. It will let the owner of the website know that you’ve shown an interest in the website and it is a polite and courteous method of letting them know you appreciate the website. This reason for posting at a guestbook is simply done as a way to show that you appreciate that the owner of the website set up a guest book for you to sign.

2. You will be making your online presence known as someone interested in whatever topic the website that you are visiting is targeted at. This may cause you to get contacted by some people promoting their business but it will also let people know that you are in business or that you are looking to make contacts in the specific targeted audience. If your targeted audience is composed of writers, then proceed by doing the following. Do a search on Google.com with the words writer site guestbooks. Go to these and post and let people know of your interest in writing, etc. Please do not fall victim to attempts to find software to post for you. The use of such software has made guestbooks less effective than they used to be; however guestbooks still provide one more place for you place your link.

3. People are interested in online communities. The building of an online community is easily accomplished through guestbooks in much the same way it can be accomplished through forums. Where both a guestbook and a forum may be topic oriented it is this writer’s opinion that a guesbook is more for the purpose of building relationships and introducing yourself. With a forum you can engage in various threaded discussions about many variations on one topic. Letting people know you are out there is easily accomplished by posting at a guest book.

4. Except for reason number one for posting in a guest book all of the reasons here are in some attempt a form of publicity if not advertising. So advertising is reason number four to post in online guest books. Do not however post out right ads to a guestbook as this can get your post easily removed. Some of the more advanced guestbooks allow for a signature file that will either accompany your post or will link to the signature file. Almost all online guest books allow for you to put a link to your URL, and this is what takes us into reason number five which I list here as the 5th most important reason for posting in online guest books.

5. The 5th and most important reason in my opinion to post in online guest books is as follows. On-line guest books are often indexed by the search engines, and therefore can help you by providing more links to your website. Including your URL gives one more place that a link to your website will be found when doing a search on the major search engines.

Yes, publicity can be accomplished by posting in these guest books and it can also help the website owner with knowledge about people visiting his or her website.