How to generate user content from a high traffic site

One of the easiest ways to create content on a website is by letting your online visitors do the work for you.

Think of websites like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft community forum. They have a lot of users who use their website and they are able to capitalize on this by generating user content.

A site like Facebook allows users to update their status on the social network and also create fan pages. What Facebook is getting from all of these is that people are typing and adding content to the network. This translates to more traffic to Facebook especially from search engines and as such Facebook is beginning to make money too by selling advertising.

Even lots of online news websites now allow people to report news for instance CNN's i-report is simply a good example of such.

Platform > User community > Content generating > Selling advertising.

A site like Twitter also does the same thing albeit with a form of microblogging which in all creates a massive blog. A lot of people find it easy to post to twitter from the web and from sms and this all adds content to twitter. Twitter is not yet selling ads but makes money mostly from sms services. The botomline is that they are able to do this because people are typing content for them.

Yahoo offers a free email service and this has made it the most loved destination for getting an email account. Because of the high number of users, Yahoo is capitalizing on this by also allowing users to create content via a lot of their platforms such as Yahoo voice, Yahoo answers and Yahoo Groups. These all allow users to publish content on Yahoo.

I once was fortunate to generate a lot of user content on a relatively new site by tapping on the power of an old highly trafficked one. Funny thing now is that after Google Panda update, my old site now has low traffic than the relatively new one mostly created by users from the old platform.

So, one can even leverage on the high traffic of an existing website to create a completely new site with lots of content.

How to do it
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In order to be able to allow user generate content by leveraging on a high traffic website, here are come tips that can help:

- Make it easy for users to share their thoughts. Don't be too strict or complex
- Allow micro-blogging
- Advertise on high traffic sites if yours is still relatively new
- Make use of email subscription platforms. This would help keep users in the loop
- Allow users to write reviews