How About -Extra- Rewards For Optimized Content..?
Passive Rewards For Your Content
I love the momentum and the recent shift in focus towards optimized content, growth and Ad Revenue, and due to the amazing conversations we have about these things nowadays, I am always thinking of the next step to make things even better, more lucrative or to yield greater success.
It's undeniable at this stage. Optimized content is crucial for growth and one of the absolute most important ingredients for long term success. Dozens of reports proves that and we have a bunch of authors who've been generating a tremendous amount of traffic to LeoFinance with their optimized content.
- Optimized content is king, in terms of organic traffic and growth.
Knowing how powerful great optimized content can be, one can also start to wonder about it's value. Is is better, or more worth than other types of content?
Content creators wants to be rewarded for their contributions, obviously, but it is up to curators to decide what content is worth, due to their upvote behaviour. One could try to discuss that, and make curators more aware of how their behaviour can affect Hive, LeoFinance and all other communities in various ways by doing slight changes in their voting patterns.
- I tried to talk about some of that here: What To Curate?! - YOUR Vote Matters!
The truth is, that it's very difficult to know which type of content that will generate traffic over time. Especially for people who aren't interested or have any prior experience with search engine optimization. That makes things obviously a lot harder in terms of trying to reward optimized content something extra, but I am not willing to give up on that idea.
I think it's a superb idea and I truly believe that we would see a lot more optimized content if content creators was rewarded for it, in some way. I am trying to find an answer for how.
While it might be difficult to figure out exactly how to reward optimized content more, or something extra, it should be rather easy for most people to understand what optimized content is though.
Before going into details about that, I want to give you two alternatives:
- A post generates traffic outside of Hive and brings more people.
- A post does not generate traffic outside of Hive and brings zero new people.
My best guess is that most people who have some minor understanding of how important traffic from the outside is, would go with option 1.
We need outward facing content, which is content that generates traffic from outside of Hive and it's communitites. That's how we will grow. We also need inward facing content, because that is crucial in terms of keeping existing users on site.
That being said, we are in need of both types of content, but the truth is that we have far more inward facing content than outward facing content, and we would have better results over time if content creators would focus on creating more outward facing content instead.
Let me give you some examples of these two types of content I am talking about, and something between the two as well:
This is inward facing content, as this post contains valuable information for anyone who is looking for content ideas, wants to know which type of content that generates the most traffic and so forth.
While this type of content obviously could potentially bring traffic, it will most certainly be quick bursts of traffic and most of the visitors will be existing users.
That being said, it's by definition almost worthless for outsiders, but can be extremely valuable for the current users. So it's great as inward facing content.
Once again mostly inward facing content, as I talk about my own progress and my success. I also tell people what I am striving for and give people the answer for it as well. This content is pretty much identical to the previous one. It fills the same purpose.
As this could be seen as a success story, it can generate a lot of traffic as people in general love the idea of "from rags to riches"-stories and tons of people are looking for opportunities to earn extra money.
This is outward facing content, while it can still serve a purpose for existing users. This type of content is what leads to growth, due to outsiders searching for information on Google. Once outward facing content has been ranked on search engines, we can look forward to organic traffic over time for months and years to come depending on the content you rank. That is why evergreen content is extremely valuable and definitely the best type of content there is.
Inward facing content can be amazing, but outward facing content, is in my personal opinion something that should be worth more. In some way. Especially as this leads to more organic traffic, Ad Revenue and new users. It leads to real growth on many different levels, but it also benefits everyone within the community.
Many users, probably the majority of the people are looking for an extra income. A passive income is definitely something most people would love to have and LeoFinance gave us that with the recent Ad Revenue change. Everyone will benefit by traffic, because LEO holders will earn passively based on stake and how much Ad Revenue we earn.
However, with some other system in place, that makes authors of optimized content that generates traffic earn something extra, on top of things, I think we would see a shift in content creation.
I think we would see much more optimized content if content creators were able to earn passively, for content they've already published. Content creators would focus more heavily on optimized content and they would put in extra effort to create content with the purpose of generating traffic.
This would lead to less inward facing content and more outward facing content, at least in theory, and that is something I would gladly see. For that reason, I am thinking of ways of how to make this a reality.
One of the ideas I have so far, is to have on-going contests that reward authors who've been pulling in the most traffic for ~6 months or so. This would give search engines enough time to rank content properly and it would be rather easy to track the results, as long as you knew who the participants where.
You could play around with this in various ways. For instance, give XXX LEO to the top 10 users or whatever. The question is where the LEO tokens would come from.. And I might have a solution for that as well:
One could rather easily use a percentage of the Ad Revenue income, for X amount of months to have enough tokens to split between the contestants.
Another option would be, for the community to donate X amount of tokens and raise enough tokens to afford the prizes.
Regardless of the how, I think I have definitely covered the why.
What Do You Think?
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Great that people like you are working in spreading the knowledge about content optimization in bringing more traffic.
I think it's extremely important for people to understand that Hive and it's communities could be on a totally different level compared to where we are today, if we focus on optimized content. That said, I'll continue to push information forward and hopefully some of it will stick at some point. :)
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Agree
I think that could work. Maybe having an account that posts every once in a while and builds some rewards might be the best way to cover this. After all, the earnings can be distributed to the people who provide good SEO articles.
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That's a great alternative way of doing things. I like the idea.
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Awesome idea mate. We can have something like a monthly leaderboard of the outside views we are getting on our posts. Top 10 or maybe 20 posts can be rewarded with extra LEO or any other kind of reward. Not sure how we can stop people from gaming this, but if this is done, we are going to see more people creating outward-facing content.
@abh12345 publishes an amazing weekly report for engagement. We can probably do something similar, biweekly or monthly for search views.
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What I have in mind, is that you only count content that is created after the contest going live, and that you only take search engine traffic in consideration.
As this requires time for search engines to rank properly, it would be rather difficult for people to cheat. At least the first few months, until the content has been ranked properly. Afterwards is a different story as you can do various things to boost traffic using fake methods.
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Makes sense. Moreover sudden spike in traffic with high bounce rate is an indication of foul play. But it requires a lot of technical effort to automate this. We might need a developer who can play with the search APIs and give us that data automatically. Do you think an SEO tool can be used to track the views?
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I think it would be fairly easy to track the amount of organic traffic with ubersuggest or any other tool when search engines have ranked the content. Especially if you knew the participants and if you only counted content that was published after the contest was announced.
A couple of months later, say 6 months, content should be ranked properly and we could see which content that brought the most organic traffic and give the authors XXX LEO or whatever for their efforts.
Might be difficult to reward people multiple times after that though, as you could easily push a lot of fake traffic afterwards.
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We discussed something similar on the daily thread yestreday and I think a donation-based reward pot would actually work but the idea of using AD revenue is even better IMO.
I also agree that we don't focus on outward content enough and most of the talk is around Hive-based stuff but I have personally had best experiences with "outsiders". These types of posts don't only help Leo but you as a creator as well.
This is just one example that pops into mind. Projects that don't have social media exposure always welcome content that talks about their products and will almost always give you a shoutout.
If we ad content rewards on top of all these incentives I'm sure people would be more willing to change their approach just a bit.
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I agree. The rewards should come from Ad Revenue, as Ad Revenue is what eventually will be affected by organic traffic. So it's a win/win situation so to speak.
I'm glad that we're on the same page. I wish we would have a more open discussion about this, with more people.
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Does it mean LeoFinance users will earn ad revenue from organic traffic too? Where can I find more info about it?
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