21 Ways for Content-Sites to Increase and Monetize Traffic

Go Social! Tap into the social marketing trend which is taking over the net. There are a variety of tools and platforms to take advantage of.

1. Social Bookmarking. On the landing page for your content, you should have an addthis.com link to allow users to bookmark your website using their social bookmarking tool of choice. This can allow for viral exposure of your content.
2. Send to friend. Create a send to friend feature to allow users to evangelize your own content within their personal network.
3. Open Social / Facebook Application. Create an application for these two popular standards which will open up your application to be viewed on the top 10 highest trafficked sites on the internet - which are all mostly social networking sites. The application can expose your content and also allow users to interact with comments or ratings. Again, you will convert casual viewers into interested fans who want to come back to your website.
4. Create social networking profiles. Create profiles on popular social networks such as myspace, facebook, and orkut. Dedicate an internal resource to update the profile frequently with new videos, add friends to your network, and see the interest in your brand and the visits to your website increase.

Think outside the browser. As internet users continue to consume information and interact with the web in new ways, you need to be prepared to tap into that and offer your services and information in an increasingly variety of formats - mobile and email are a few good ones for starters.

1. SMS Contests. Like American Idol, you can incorporate SMS polling into your existing live events.
2. SMS Marketing - same concept but sending videos by SMS to mobile devices.
3. Mobile site. Create a mobile version of your website for on-the-go viewing.
4. Email Marketing. Create daily or weekly alerts to be sent out by email to your most loyal user base. Members will enjoy the email and will be reminded to come back to your site daily. Its great to get a new visitor to your website, but if you get a new email address, you can continue to market to that person for years, and even for a marginally interested person, get hundreds or thousands of site visits from them, simply because you have the ability to continue to communicate with them.

User-generated Content. The good news is that users want to contribute to your website, they're ready and waiting to add valuable content to your website for you. The catch is that you have to put some time into thinking what are the most appropriate ways to offer these opportunities to your audience. And also, you don't want to do this in a vacuum, because it will take a while for enough users to contribute their own content, so you will need to continue supplying the content until your user-base takes off.

1. Upload pictures / videos. Create contests around popular themes on your site.to encourage users to submit their own videos and pictures to the site. Announce the winner on your live event.
2. Incentivize by Participation. Your viewers want to participate with your website. By creating contests and user submission campaigns, you will give users a reason to visit the website. Create a contest themed around one of your categories of content.
3. Classifieds. Create a classified section to allow visitors to interact with eachother and form a community on your website.

Audio / Video. As more and more video websites are gaining popularity and being invested in by large corporations, its not hard to see where the future of information consumption will be. The good news is that tools for creating your own audio and video are increasingly more affordable and accessible. Here's how to leverage your audio/video:

1. Embeddable Video Player. Leverage existing video content by adding a video player with embedded advertising. Allow users to embed this video into their website, blog or myspace page to share revenue by an affiliate program. Leverage the long-tail effect of users sharing your content within their own networks. Although you may be weary of giving out your content for free, people will always want to come back to your website to get the full experience of your brand, so you need not be worried.
2. Increase exposure of web content. Place teaser video clips on Youtube and other popular video sharing sites, to tap into the large user bases on those sites and convert them into fans and frequent visitors of your website.
3. Flash Media. If you're still using windows media as a video player or audio player, stop right now! Standardize your video to flash video format and get rid of windows media player
4. Create a video montage. Gmail did a similar campaign (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/gmail_video.html) where they encouraged viewers to submit videos with certain parameters, and they stitched all the videos together into an interesting and funny montage.

And more! Here are some additional weapons to add to your arsenal.

1. SEO Optimization. For the purposes of greater exposure to search engines, each piece of content, whether text, audio, pictures, or video should have its own separate landing page. Its OK to have a player on the home page which allows the user to conveniently browse all the videos on your site, but a link should be available to a dedicated page for each video with a good URL structure. Some suggestions for additional features on this page are user comments and related videos.
2. Adwords campaigns. The key here is the customized landing page - you need to take the time to figure out a very specific target that you want to market to and create campaigns along those lines.
3. Interactive game. Create a flash video game tailored to the interests of your viewers.
4. Live events. Create live events centered around your content. If you have video content, these can be live webcasts. If audio, they can be live teleconferences. If it is simply written content, create a chat room and announce a time when you will be online, live, available for question and answer.
5. RSS Feeds. Create feeds to syndicate your content in this popular format. There are many aggregators which will pick up your content and a growing user base of information consumers who prefer to consume news, videos, and photos through the convenience of an RSS reader.
6. Blogging. Dedicate an internal resource to write blog posts frequently. Search engines love blogs and you will be rewarded with traffic for well-written and frequent blog posts.

Jason Giddens is a Project Manager for Kremsa Design, a web development company with expertise in Flash and PHP. At KD, we push Flash and PHP beyond their limits. Our processes are tailored to industry professionals, agencies, and designers and our goal is to develop top quality products at affordable prices.