eBook Series: User Generated Content
I let my visitors create the content for me:
That’s right – why should I bust my butt writing ‘stuff’ when other people can do it for me? The reason for wanting as much content as possible on your site is because Google and other search-engines love it. The more new, unique ‘stuff’ you have on your site, the more Google will favor your site in search results – resulting in more visitors, and popularity.
HOW I LET USERS GENERATE CONTENT:
I enabled the comments feature of Drupal. Drupal has a feature that allows users to post comments on pages. Activating this feature and inviting visitors to comment or ask questions is like giving food to the Google-bot that indexes your website into it’s search engine – Each time Google visits your site it will see more ‘stuff’ (Google likes that) – Also, having more ‘stuff’ increases the chances that people doing Google searches will hit on something on one of your pages. For the first several months I allowed anonymous users to post comments/questions. I had to watch every post very carefully to watch for trolls, spammers, bad language, etc, and I had to delete many ‘bad’ posts.
On some pages I got the commenting started by making ‘anonymous’ posts:
At first, when I wasn’t getting many visitors to the site, I would make my own anonymous posts to get things started. Eventually other people started posting comments and I didn’t need to do this anymore and was able to delete all those posts. There are also websites and services that will allow you to ‘buy’ posts or exchange posts to help get things started.
I created a forum within my site:
Another feature of Drupal is integrated ‘forums’. A forum is another great way to get visitors to write content for you. In Drupal, each time someone makes a new forum post, it looks like a new page to Google’s search engine spiders & bots. I waited a few months, until I was getting a lot of traffic before I activated the forum. Activating the forum, which was one of the smartest thing’s I did, was not a calculated move; I was simply following the direction that visitors were taking the website. There came a point when the number of page ‘comments’ per day made it obvious that the site was turning more into a forum than a static site.
I used the PathAuto module for Drupal:
The “Pathauto” add-on module for Drupal will automatically create URLs based on the title of the forum topics that users post. This makes for better search results from Google and other search-engines. This ‘on-page SEO’ is important for long-term traffic from search engines. When configuring PathAuto, be sure to specify using “-” (dashes) between words, and not “_” (underscores). Google will see words with dashes between them as individual, search-able words. Words separated by underscores will be treated as one, long word (more about this in a later chapter).
Also, by activating The Path (different from PathAuto above) module I can easily modify URLs so that they match popular search terms.
For example:
By default when using PathAuto a forum post with the title “Help, my computer isn’t working” will have a url of “http://grownupgeek.com/help-my-computer-isnt-working”
I will often change the URL to something like:
“http://grownupgeek.com/how-to-recover-windows-xp”
Changing the URL to a popular search phrase related to the post greatly increases the Google ranking for that particular phrase. You can only change the URL’s if you have activated the Drupal Path module.
After some time, when I had run out of things to write about, comments and forum posts by visitors allowed the website to continue to grow. There came a point that I could just sit-back and let it run – for me this took about 8 months. This does not mean I was “done”, it just means that my content creation was now on auto-pilot.
I use newsletters to keep members and non-members coming back:
After the website began getting popular, I started restricting posts to members only – requiring visitors to register (and give their email) to make posts. I then used Drupal’s simple-news module to send out a newsletter to all members each week. The newsletter mentions what’s been going on at the website, and keeps members coming back. I also use the newsletter to point-out pages with Commission Junction links – pointing out how wonderful those products are. Now that the site is older and has more members I only send out newsletters about once per month. I have found that members and subscribers don’t like the be overloaded with too much email.
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Hi randy,
I like the way you wrote the ebook, it’s clear and give many useful tips. I’m starting implementing it on my newly website. Thanks for the great tips, keep posting