Interactive Content

A guide to interactive content.

Intro

This is content where your visitors can post information to your site by interacting with your site and with other visitors. The most popular examples are: a forum, a comment section on pages, polls, journals, or quizzes.

The four great advantages of interactive content are: 1. After setting it up, it takes little time for the webmaster to maintain. After setting up a forum, polls, or quizzes then you don't need to do much. 2. You are actually getting your visitors to build your content for you. For example, every webmaster starts a forum because they know if their forum becomes popular they can then get a lot of traffic for their a site but don't have to cater to the visitors much. 3. Dynamic content is sticky. Making a page interactive will build traffic more because a person who reads an article and then comments on it will be more likely to come back to that page to see how other people responded to his comments. 4. Interactive content makes your visitors feel like they are part of the site as they talk to other people and get to know people. This builds their loyalty because the community that they are know a part of isn't something they can get from another site.

These days everyone is setting up a forum but unfortunately they are finding out that it is not as easy as it looks. This is because of the "network effect". This means that you need a huge volume of other people in order to make the service valuable to anyone. Having good interactive content is like running a poker site - if there are no other people there then it doesn't have any value to a few people. And although I do recommend your site has a forum I think many webmaster underutilize other interactive tools they can be used on their site. Commenting on different parts of the site, like articles, is one of the best ways to build traffic. For some people reading articles is boring, but the comments spice things up and the comments end up gaining more attention than the article itself. And polls and quizzes are features that I don't see on sites often enough.

 
Advantages:
Good interactive content is very sticky. If someone on your site is involved in a conversation with another person they have to come back to your site to continue that conversation.
Most of the time you need no coding knowledge. This is because there are free scripts out ther everywhere that help you set up a forum, poll, or a quiz.
It takes little time investment. Your visitors are the ones that are building your content.
The network effect. The "network effect" can insulate you from small competitors who can't build enough traffic to compete with you.


 
Disadvantages:
It is the hardest kind of content to build. This is for a couple of reasons. One is because it is extremely hard to get people to devote their time and effort to posting on your page. A second reason is because everyone is trying to do it today by setting up forums.
There are few SEO benefits. Sometimes you may get a forum thread to come up in a Google search but other than that you will get no "free" traffic like you would get with static content.
It is harder than it looks. Getting people to post on your page is harder than you think.
The network effect. The "network effect" will work against you when you are trying to build traffic.


Examples
An example that works well with interactive content are hotornot.com which allow visitors to rate the pictures of other visitors. There are so many good forums out there that there is no point in showing examples of those.


 
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