Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

YOU CAN COMPEL VISITORS BY BEING COMPELLING

You need to compel users to spend time on your site and the only way to do that is to be compelling. How you do that depends on the type of site that you have. Think about (or talk with your users about) what it is you have that no one else does. Why do visitors need to come to your site rather than anyone else’s? If you can’t come up with anything, then you may need to work on your site a little before sending out the party invites.

Once you have some value to your site, you need to seed the content a bit before asking others to contribute. You can partner with other content sites (for instance, review sites) to get this content. Just keep in mind that this puts you back into the nonunique content space, and those pages are unlikely to rank in search engines. They still may be valuable for seeding purposes, though, so you may find that they’re valuable for your needs. Or perhaps you can create a mash-up of content that adds unique value on top of each separate component. You can also hire writers to write content for you, although in that case, you should consider how to disclose it (if the writing is for something like reviews). One way is REI’s model of both expert and user reviews—each on their own tab (Figure 9.17).

Figure 9.17 Combining Expert and User-Generated Content

Source: Rei.com

You can also launch with an invite-only test ...