Create Website Content

How to Get Your Visitors to Create Content for You?

An ongoing challenge for webmasters today is to provide fresh content that gives visitors a reason to return to their site. Unless you have a full-time staff dedicated to creating regular content, the time involved can be crippling.

Wouldn't it be great if someone else would write timely, relevant content for you? Sure, but what are the odds of that happening? Well, many webmasters are already enjoying this phenomenon, and I'm happy to count myself among them.

Set it up.
Whether your site has a catalog of products or a collection of articles, you can design your pages to allow visitors to post reviews of whatever is featured on the page. They can share their experiences with items they've bought or post comments on the information in your site. Don't confuse this powerful tool with a discussion forum. You create the topic of each page, and encourage visitors to post updates with the latest information in this area.

The more information you provide on your site, the better service you are providing to your visitors; but they aren't the only ones who benefit from including reviews. It's also a boon to you as a webmaster. Even if you never wrote another line of new copy, your pages will continue to grow with relevant content. Granted you still have to spend a little time reading the reviews and moderating what appears on your site, but the time required is much less than you would spend writing original content.

Why someone else will create content for you.
While the advantages to the webmaster and reader may be obvious, you are probably wondering what incentives exist for the reviewer. A few lucky souls have enough free time to share their opinions online for the mere satisfaction of seeing their own words, but most will need something more tangible before they invest the time to write a useful review. The onus is on you, the webmaster, to create an appropriate incentive. The importance of link popularity in search engine rankings provides a powerful clue. At AffiliateScreen.com, I allow my visitors to post reviews of their experiences with online affiliate programs. At the bottom of their review, they have the option of including a link to another page that supports what they've written (or they can simply include their affiliate link for the program). AffiliateScreen.com gives them the additional credibility of their expertise appearing on a third-party site.

Look at this from the reviewer's perspective. Here's a unique opportunity to gain an external link pointing to the reviewer's website, but this is far more valuable than a random reciprocal link. Search engines are determining link popularity by examining both the quantity and relevance of links. The page with their link is loaded with keywords related to the product or service, and the reviewer can include additional relevant keywords in their post. The reviewer actually has a hand in creating the page that will link to their site. This is extremely powerful! Can you begin to see how anyone looking to increase traffic to their site would jump at the opportunity to create content for your website?

Now you may have some concerns that allowing anyone to add content and links to your site is inviting your competitors to steal your traffic. If your site has detailed reviews of products on your site, anyone who leaves your site to visit a competitor won't spend much time there before realizing that your site has useful, original content that they can't find anywhere else. If that doesn't put your mind at ease, though, there's nothing to stop you from including a disclaimer when someone submits a review. Explain in this disclaimer that direct references to your competitors will be removed to keep the reviews informative and to avoid marketing hype. You are the webmaster, after all.

You can draw even more traffic by allowing visitors to rate the usefulness of each review. Many reviewers will encourage people to visit your site so they can read and rate the review. More important than just being a gimmick to increase traffic, rating reviews allows you to sort them by quality and expose your average visitors to the best possible content first.

Promote it!
Once you've got the code in place, it's important to publicize this new feature of your website. If you have experience or know someone with experience writing press releases, you may be able to garner attention from news and niche media. Another highly effective form of publicity is to mention the new feature above the fold on the main page of your site.

If you have a newsletter, promote the review process in your next issue. In fact, as you begin to accumulate reviews, they can serve as great additional content for your newsletter. Simply include the best reviews in each issue. As with the reviews on your website, you are providing valuable content for your audience, giving your reviewer great exposure, and saving time for yourself. It's a win-win-win situation.

Tips to Maintain your Website to Keep Visitors Coming Back

When you design a website you should create it so that your visitors are constantly coming back for more. In order for you to keep your visitors coming back you need to keep up with maintaining your website, and offering things that will keep your visitors busy.

Tip #1

Keep your visitors coming back. Well, how do you do this? You can start by creating a forum. This will allow your visitors to interact with each other and meet new people.

Next you may want to create a page, or a topic on your forum based on new content that you add. This will keep your visitors up to date on what your doing around your website.

Also you may want to create a news letter. A news letter could contain many things. You can write tips and tricks articles, you can use it to tell your visitors what's new on your website, you can offer special deals, and much more with a newsletter.

Tip #2

Build a strong network of incoming links. Incoming links are a very important object in the search engine game. If you don't constantly increase the number of links coming into your website you will start to loose your high ranks on search engines. Or you may not even be able to obtain high ranks if you are just starting out.

When you start getting incoming links you should create some way to keep track of these websites. Document them somehow in a word document, on a webpage, or in a excel document. Check back on these links regularly to make sure they still have your link on their webpage especially if your linking back to their website.

Tip #3

Monitor your website statistics. This should be a thing you do on a weekly basis. Find a company that will either give you a report on who's visiting your website, and where. Or use your exhisting hosting companies service (if they offer one).

When monitoring your statistics you want to see where your visitors are going the most. Try and use these statistics to your advantage. If they are going to your article directory more than they are your forum you will want to spend more time increasing your article directory rather than monitoring your forums.

Syndicating Your Articles: Pros and Cons

A few years back, I read an article about how beneficial it was to allow other websites to publish your articles. You supposedly got free promotion for your site and gained links pointing to your site. During that time, there seemed to be a proliferation of places that would publish your articles for free, and places where you could submit your articles for publication. I was caught up in that fever in those years, and actually wound up having some of my early articles syndicated across the web. I have since stopped that practice, learning that it has its own problems as well as benefits. This article deals with some of the lessons I learnt from that period.

Benefits of Syndicating Your Articles

I do not deny that there are numerous benefits from syndicating your articles. The traditionally cited advantages are, in my experience, true.

1. Brand-name Awareness

When your articles are published by numerous websites and newsletters across the web, with your name or company's name displayed in the byline of those articles, one major benefit is that your (or your company's) name becomes well-known. So if visitors frequently come across your name when reading articles about (say) "mobile phones", in their minds, you will become an authority on that subject. The next time they encounter your recommendations, they are more likely to give it a higher regard.

2. Attracting Visitors to Your Site

In ages past, when I used to syndicate my articles, visitors would arrive at my site after having read those articles on other sites, hoping to find more articles relevant to them. Naturally, when you write articles, your byline should include your URL to take advantage of this.

Needless to say, your article also needs to have some substance of use to the visitor. An article that is an advertisement in disguise will probably not fool many people.

3. Increasing Your Page Rank on Google

Google counts a site's importance by the number of links pointing to it. If your article is syndicated by many sites, the number of links pointing to your site will also increase (provided of course those sites publish your byline with a direct link to your site).

For more information on how Google ranks a website and how you can improve your ranking on Google , check out my other article on Google Search Engine Placement Tips.

Article Syndication Problems

If everything is as rosy as it seems above, why aren't more people syndicating their articles? There is, of course, a downside to syndicating your article.

1. Obsolescence

Unless your article deals with a topic that is static and never changes, you will face the problem of your article becoming out-of-date as the years go by. Unfortunately, when you syndicate your article to other sites, you usually lose control over your article since it is typically hosted on someone else's website. In fact, if you're particularly successful in getting other sites to publish your article, your article may be on hundreds of websites across the Internet. You no longer have the freedom to simply edit the article to update it.

The problem with obsolescence is that instead of increasing brand-name awareness, those articles can damage your reputation, since when it becomes obsolete, knowledgeable people reading those old articles will get the impression that you don't know your stuff.

2. Unauthorized Modifications

Another problem that I've encountered when syndicating articles is that the webmasters that publish your article sometimes feel that they have a right to edit your article, even if you have explicitly forbidden this in the licence that you issued them.

They may edit this to divide your article into many pages so that they can display more advertisements on your article; or they may change the links on your article to point to their affiliate links; or they may move your byline and URL to a common page for authors (negating the usefulness of your syndication in getting more visitors or search engine links); and so on.

The list of things webmasters do to articles submitted to them is very long.

In view of this, syndicating your articles is not a simple submit and forget process. You have to monitor what happens to your articles, deal with recalcitrant webmasters, and the like.

A related problem is when you submit certain articles for republication, but reserve others to be published only on your site. Some webmasters, having obtained one of your licensed re-publishable articles, don't bother to read the copyright and licence statements on the rest of your site and grab your other articles for republishing on their site. It seems that the moment you allow any of your articles to be republished, you have to be vigilant in policing the sites you submit to for infractions of this nature.

3. Revenue

If your articles are the main content of your site, ie, your site exists for the sole purpose of publishing those articles, like Affiliated-Business.com does, then it is likely that your site derives its income directly or indirectly from those articles (such as from the advertising that is displayed on the same pages as the articles). By allowing other sites to publish those articles, you have in effect, worked for free to allow the other sites to earn their income.

Notice how I have qualified my statements above. I referred only to sites whose sole purpose are the articles they publish. Some sites publish articles to promote their main business, a product or service. For example, I have read numerous articles published by various web hosts about web hosting. Their main business is web hosting. The articles they write, whether they recommend their own company or not, are designed to ultimately promote their business of web hosting (even if it's just to increase brand-awareness). Such sites do not suffer from the disadvantage listed here.

4. Mirroring Problems

Certain search engines, notably Google, frown on mirrors. Or perhaps more accurately, if it detects that a site is a mirror of another, it seems to give the mirror site a page rank of zero, resulting in the mirror site never showing up on the initial pages of a search.

When you distribute your articles for publication on the web, you're in effect mirroring your articles. If all your articles are mirrored on other sites, there is the danger that Google may decide that you are a mirror of those sites, and drop your site's page rank to zero. I have no idea if this has ever occurred to anyone as a result of syndicating their articles, but it seems to me the danger is real enough to be cautious about wildly syndicating all your site's content. It is possible that it will not occur if there are sufficient differences - but since I'm not sure about this, I have no intention of running the risk.

5. Association with Spam

You should also beware of simply allowing anyone to re-publish your articles in their email newsletter. The problem is that if you do not know the person, and issue a licence to him/her, and that person publishes your article in a newsletter that later becomes the target of a spam complaint, your site might become associated with spam.

Who Benefits Most from Syndicating Articles?

In spite of the long list of disadvantages listed above, certain sites benefit more from syndicating their articles than others.

As I have already mentioned above, if you are actually selling something on your site, whether it be goods or services, writing an article related to your product or service and syndicating it might perhaps bring more benefit to your business than harm.

For example, if you're a bicycle manufacturer, you might want to write an article on the features of a good bicycle. Your byline should include your website URL, but don't write your article as a blatant advertisement for your product. If your article appears somewhat neutral, some hobby sites would probably be willing to republish your article as a general article with tips on choosing bicycles. Visitors reading it might like it so much that they click your URL to check out your site.

On the other hand, if your site comprises mainly of your articles, you might prefer to have people visit your site directly for the content, and forgo the benefits of syndication. But of course your mileage may vary, according to how you actually go about doing this.

Avoiding the Problem of Obsolescence

One way to avoid the problem of obsolescence when you syndicate your articles is to embed it in a JavaScript and give other webmasters the URL of that JavaScript. Since the JavaScript is hosted on your own site, you will be able to update the article any time you wish, and the article that appears on other sites will be instantly updated.

For example, let's say that you wish to syndicate a few lines from one of John Donne's poems. Normally you would have to write the following HTML fragment:

To convert that fragment into JavaScript, you would place every line above inside a JavaScript "document.write" instruction. For ease of understanding, I have placed each line in a separate "document.write" below.

Others syndicating that article would simply include the following lines in their web pages to have your entire article appear when it is loaded. I'll assume (for the sake of this example) that you've saved the script above as "donne.js" and that your website is at http://your.domain.example.com.

If the article you write contains inverted commas (ie, double quotes), you will need to precede each inverted comma (quotation mark) in your document.write statements with a backslash. For example, write the JavaScript code for

as

Since this whole process is rather laborious, especially if you have more than one article to syndicate, I have written a Windows program (a "Wizard", if you like) to automate the conversion process for those who wish to use this method of syndication. Given your article to process, NetSyndic will generate the equivalent article syndication JavaScript for you. NetSyndic is free, and can be downloaded from http://www.thesitewizard.com/netsyndic/ .

The advantages of using a JavaScript to syndicate your articles are:

1. The article is hosted on your own web space. You can thus update it any time you wish.
2. You avoid the problem of the other websites modifying your article without your consent.

The disadvantages are:

1. If you syndicate your article to 100 websites, and 1000 visitors visit each of those 100 websites, your web server would have served your JavaScript 1000 X 100 times. In other words, you will be paying for the bandwidth for the display of your article on the other sites.
2. Not every webmaster will allow you to submit a JavaScript of your article. Most of them prefer to host the actual article. Furthermore, no search engine that I know of (at this time) will actually execute your JavaScript in order to index the actual content. Thus if you want to use this method, you should probably keep a normal HTML version that you use on your own site, so that at least your version is indexed by the search engines. In a sense, this is also an advantage, since the search engines would not consider your page a mirror of any other page as it would not be able to index the JavaScript-generated version on the other sites.
3. If visitors disable JavaScript in their browser, the page will not display your article. The NetSyndic-generated JavaScript will show a message asking the visitor to enable JavaScript in order to view the page.

Should You Syndicate Your Articles?

As you have probably realised by now, there's more than meets the eye to syndicating your articles than pure promotion of your website. I have attempted to give you an overview of the things I have discovered when I syndicated my articles some years back. However, ultimately, whether or not you wish to syndicate your articles and the method you use to do it would depend on what you consider more important and the nature of your site. In certain situations, article syndication can indeed boost your site's prominence and ratings as is frequently promised.