5 Best Ways To Encourage User Generated Content On Your Website

We all know that content is king but creating new content frequently is a big challenge to many of us. You might feel writer’s burn out after some days. You will not find out new topics to write about after some days. You will be stuck then. So in this web 2.0 era, what you need is to generate more user generated content on your site.

What is user generated content? User generated content is the valuable comments or forum posting or guest writing on your site. User generated content gives tremendous SEO boost to a site. But getting user generated content is not so easy. First of all,  people are lazy to write and comment. You need to come up with a strategy so that people feel interested to comment on your site.

If your site is new then patience is a virtue. Don’t expect people come and comment in overnight. You initially need to write consistently with new topics as if you are the only audience of your site. If you can continue this for atleast 6 months, you will get very good result for long term. Now coming to the point of how to get more user generated content on your site, I am showing you 5 best ways to encourage user generated content on your website.

i> Talk about controversy - try inspiring discussion by writing about something that is likely to rile up readers’ emotions or split opinion. Don’t always write what you think readers want to hear . Be bold to put your own opinion there.

ii> Publish informational graphs or stats of your own – Analyze on different hot trends and try to come up with your own graphs, charts and analysis. People will credit you as source and you will get many backlinks.

iii> Include lists – give 5-10 points on how or what or where or why. This helps your site to be referred back by users and other websites.

iv> Make videos – Create your own videos on your domain expertise. People love videos and embed to their websites.

v> Compile a collection of best links and best resources on any subject -  Do the hard work of research and give them the best resources to find at one place. It helps a lot to get referral from others.

Secondly, make your posts paragraphed and short – Try to write your post in maximum 500 words and maintain atleast 3-4 paragraphs. People normally don’t read line by line. They scan paragraph by paragraph. So your content must be easily comprehended. Never write blog post like a press release or news paper or sales pitch. Personalize your post with your own writing sense.
Thirdly, change the status of ‘no comments’ to ‘be the first to comment‘ – Change the status of ‘no comments’ to ‘be the first to comment’ in your site template. You just need to change it in your index.php or page.php or single.php or comment.php file in wordpress. It’s easy. This is a normal human psychology that people feel lazy to comment on a post which has no comment. Before reading the whole post they sometimes think that the post might not be so worthy to read as there is no comment. So try to invite them by changing the status message.

Fourthly, be proactive – Be proactive and respond to comments left on your blog. Your readers will value your interaction and feel more affinity with you and the blog. In turn, you will get to know your most loyal readers. Also be proactive to join as guest writer to other blogs and invite them to write on your blog  too. you can increase your reader base substantially by doing this.

Finally, set the optimum time to publish – Is the timing of your blog post such that readers aren’t active when it goes live? If your main readers are asleep when you publish, your post may get lost in the barrage of content presented to readers when they finally stop in. By observing traffic and reader interaction you can figure out the optimum time to publish. You can always use wordpress time-stamp feature for a specific time and date to publish your post. This is very good for scheduling your posts in advance.

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