Facilitating UGC For Your Site

One of the defining aspects of web 2.0 is based around User Generated Content or UGC. This is defined by "A web site owner provides facilities for site visitors to add comments or copy to existing pages create their own pages and reviews or upload their own media such as images, audio and video clips.” It is said that by 2010, UGC will account for 70% of the web’s content.

Enabling this facility on your website offers a wealth of benefits. It requires a certain amount of moderation but it means that your customers are doing your work for you. They are rating or reviewing your products, your quality of service, advocating your company to fellow users which in turn helps to both keep the site fresh for search engines and helps to retain those users as loyal customers.
On average, a loyal customer is 5 x more profitable to you than a new customer.

Enabling UGC on your site means customers are returning to the site to add content, whilst there, they may have a look around to see what else is new and what current promotions are being held.
A “sticky” site is something that every website owner strives to achieve.
Content can be provided in many different formats which can subsequently be shared via other social media tools – video files which can be uploaded to YouTube, photos which can be shared on Flickr, all linking back to your site. Once the content is taken off your site, it requires monitoring to manage your reputation. Tools such as http://www.google.com/alerts and http://www.blogpulse.com help you do this by sending you a weekly report with a round up of where your company has been mentioned on the web.
Remember that no matter how good your search engine rankings are, a static website will start to fall out of the search engine rankings unless content is regularly added to it. With so much competition, it’s up to you to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Adwords Qualification

Well I finally got a bit of time to take the Adwords Professional qualification. I'd heard that it was difficult and that you really needed all of the hour and a half alloted to complete the exam.
In actual fact, it wasn't as difficult as I'd expected and took only an hour to complete - obviously I'm pleased to be able to say that I passed it :-)
I'm now spurred on to take the Analytics exam, although I think that might be a different case as analytics is pretty technical which I can only take soo far. I think that'll be one for the new year as I've my IDM exam coming up in December and need all the spare time I've got to gem up for that (and practice my handwriting - crazy that exams about using the digital medium, and we have to write by hand)