Content is what makes the wheels go round – it is what Google uses to index your pages, it is what readers come to your pages for and it is what sets a great site apart from a good site.
As such then, your site is going to live and die on the quality of its content, and if you don’t have compelling and entertaining things to read on your pages then you can’t expect to keep your visitors for very long or to draw in new readers.
Thus it follows too that you should spend a fair deal of your time developing content, or alternatively that you should be investing some of your profits into writing that you can buy to use on your site. The more content you host, the more there will be to read and the more readers you can get. So imagine then how useful it might be if you could get your content for free – by getting your visitors to write it for you themselves!
Well, it turns out that it can be done, and that there are actually number of techniques for doing just that…
How to Get Your Visitors to Write Your Content For You
One of the very best ways to get more content for your site without putting in huge amounts of work yourself is to get your visitors to write it for you! This surprisingly effective strategy can be accomplished with some of the following strategies…
You Don’t Know if You Don’t Ask…
One very easy strategy for getting visitors to write your content for you for instance is simply to ask them to. This might sound a little too good to be true, but actually most people aren’t trying to make money online and so aren’t aware of the value of writing. All they know is that they like your site, and that it would be exciting to be a part of it and to be a contributor. Publish their work and they get some exposure and something to show their friends while you get free content to bring more traffic – everyone wins!
Competition
If you want to add a little incentive though, then you can always offer a prize for the best content you get by running a competition. Competitions are great for marketing and people love the opportunity to test their skills. Add in the possibility of some form of free gift and you’ll find that people jump at the opportunity to get involved.
Community
Another way to get people to provide you with free content is to provide them with a platform for discussion and chat. This could be a forum or it could be a comments section on your individual articles, but if you give visitors somewhere to discuss the subject then you’ll find it quickly amounts to a lot of content that provides more for the search engines to index and more value for readers who come to the site.
E-Mails
This is one that you are less likely to have heard of: publishing e-mails you receive. If your site gets big enough, and if you write informatively on a topic, then you are going to get questions from time to time from fans and people who want to discuss the subject. You can help them out by answering, and then ask for permission to publish the whole conversation and that way gain more content to print.
