Online communities, such as the popular DigitalPoint and SitePoint provide webmasters all around the world with a place to find like-minded people. Forums are great places to interact with those of a certain demographic. If huge webmasters forums aren’t your taste, then you should try some of the smaller, more quality webmaster forums such as Talkfreelance - which has a small, dedicated member-base which take an active role in the community there.

You can use forums to your advantage in many ways. Simply by just adding a link to your site in your signature whilst a member of these forums can help you create numerous backlinks and interest in your site. The more active you are as a member, the more your link is exposed to the community at those forums.

Webmaster forums are very commonly used as buying and selling platforms for sites, domains, content, all kinds of elements pertaining to web development.

Forums aren’t the only online communities that you can take advantage of. You also have the upcoming era of social networking and social bookmarking. If you don’t already know, social networking is a site whereby people can interact on a whole new level with each other; and this opens up new bounds to interactivity and sharing. Examples of these are StumbleUpon, and Digg, where you can share across a wide, targeted audience, or sites such as MySpace, and FaceBook, which hold massive communities of “networked” friends.

All these sites can help you expose your sites to a larger audience, and can help drive large amounts of interest and traffic by extending out to these networks of people.