According to Alexa, Scribd.com is currently the 397th most visited site on the Internet and the Alexa graph shows an impressive growth curve suggesting the site’s popularity will continue to increase. And yet strangely many people have yet to hear of it, or figure out how to use it for the benefit of their online business.Scribd allows users to upload documents – pdfs, Word files and the like – to their website for all to see. You can even email them to Scribd and they will add the files to the site for you. A built in search engine helps visitors to find what they are looking for and just like any good Web 2.0 site you can also set up or join groups of likeminded individuals. Further interactivity is provided in terms of being able to add documents to your favourites or to give them a virtual thumbs-up in the form of “likes”.So far, Scribd has remained quite a “clean” community – it has so far avoided the mass spam and junk submissions that often plague Web 2.0 sites after a while meaning that the site provides a genuinely useful service and there is some excellent information available there. This may be due in part to the way that any links on Scribd are “nofollowed” so you will generate no search engine benefits from setting up an account and adding your documents.There is still traffic to be had from Scribd though if you do it right. Those links may not send search engine juice but they can still send visitors your way.Firstly appreciate that Google views PDF documents as different to web pages so you can reuse existing materials of yours and so leverage articles you have already written on Scribd. One tool that I have found useful is pdfonline.com which allows you to turn your existing blog posts into PDF’s – with all hyperlinks intact. Alternatively, copy and paste articles into OpenOffice’s free software, add an author bio with a link to your site and simply save it as a PDF.Once you’ve turned some of your best blog posts into PDFs ensuring they link back to your website, then submitted them to Scribd using long tail keywords for the title and file name, it’s time to get marketing.Firstly add your documents to as many related groups as possible and even consider setting up your own. As traffic numbers build, if you control what will become a popular group like “Mortgages” or “Payday Loans” this could become very valuable in time.Secondly, aim to get as many readers, “likes” and favourites as possible. Choosing the right longtail keywords in the first place will help this, as will providing a few links to your document pages such as from your website. But you can also embed documents just like YouTube videos into your web site or blog thus increasing readership, or alternatively publish articles and short reports only at Scribd and then send your visitors over there to get them.At the time of writing, Scribd is one of the Web 2.0 sites that is taking over the “authority” mantle from Squidoo and seems to be easily hitting top 10 spots in Google for long tail keywords and so is a perfect target for article marketers.k