People are attracted to running websites as a way of making money for many reasons, and most of these are related to the financial freedom and time advantages it brings you. For instance if you run a website then you will make money all the time from product sales and ad clicks – even while you’re sleeping. If you don’t write anything new for a long time then it will be months before your profits start going down meaning you can take holiday whenever you want; and at the same time you will find that you can do this job from anywhere. On top of all this running a website requires very little in terms of overheads which again means it’s a fool-proof plan, one that anyone can get started with and one that certainly won’t lose you money even if things don’t go to plan.
Of course there is still a little work you have to do yourself or that you need to pay for – you need to do SEO, you need to write content, you need to make design changes to your site and you need to promote it through social networking sites. But imagine if you didn’t have to do that either – imagine if your visitors did all that for you. Well for some webmasters there’s no need to imagine, and the smartest and savviest site owners are already getting their visitors to do their leg work so they can rest easy. Here we will look at how this works and how you can do it yourself.
Link Baiting
Link baiting sounds like a black hat SEO technique, but actually it’s far from it and is one of the most organic and natural ways to build good quality links. Essentially the idea here is to make your articles really good (whether that means they are funny, highly useful, or even controversial) and to give them a great title. Then this will encourage your visitors to want to share what they find with friends and others through forums and social networks.
Social Networking Buttons
Having great articles will give people the desire to share your site among their friends, but if you include social networking buttons and widgets like ‘Share This’ then you can make it easy for people to spread the word however they choose with the touch of a button.
Invite Writers
Have a link at the top of your site that says ‘write for this site’ and you’ll find that it’s not long before people start to submit their work meaning less content for you to write. You might wonder why they would do this – but the simple reason is that people love to see their work published and to feel a ‘part’ of something. Better yet, because they wrote it you know they are going to want to share it meaning more link building.
Have Forums and Comments Sections
If you have a ‘write for us’ button, it will still only be those with literary ambitions and sometimes delusions who act. On the other hand with a forum or a comments area for your articles, you will find that anyone with an opinion starts to post on your site providing you with more free content.
Crowdsourcing
When it comes to design changes, it’s best to defer to your existing audience – after all it’s them and people like them that you are trying to impress. Crowdsourcing means doing just this – asking them via your main site or via your forum to make suggestions for changes you could make.