Every good developer knows that mass of unique content is the bane of all things good on the interweb. Apart from hiring 100’s of copywriters and having them push out a truck load of content each day, how do we acquire this mass of content? Talk is cheap. Many users will offer their opinion anywhere given the chance. Provide them the means to do this and you will find unique content flooding in without any financial offset. The goal is, little effort for big results, or put simply: more for less.

5 ways to attract ‘cheap talk’

1. Reviews

Allowing user driven reviews are an excellent way to provide your visitors with unique information about a product. It may help a potential customer make that final decision to buy the product, and more importantly increases the chances of a potential customer finding you, by providing them with quantities of detailed information that cost you nothing. Combine this with comments and you will have a very powerful way of sparking creative feedback and reviews with minimal abuse.

2. Forums

Let’s face it, where would the internet be without forums? Sometimes people need a place to talk about anything they please. Offering a forum on your site will allow just that. But keeping a forum running is a lot of work. There is nothing worse than stumbling upon a forum that has that ‘ghost town’ feeling. However don’t let this deter you. Simply spend half an hour a day maintaining, deleting spam, responding to unanswered posts and the benefits will soon be obvious.

3. Comments

Allowing comments on just about anything - reviews, articles, blogs, products - allows user driven discussion. Not only do they add keywords to your site’s content in a natural way, it allows a way for the page to be updated without lifting a finger. Abuse can be kept minimal with good anti-spam measures and good moderation. People may even come back to read the comments alone (reddit anyone?).

4. Product Ratings

Not only does this allow for more content then you could produce on your lone some, it actually builds trust in your potential customers. If the average rating is a good rating, then not unlike sheep a customer will form an opinion based on others. And on top of that we can use the statistics provided by the ratings to help suggest products or articles to a customer. For example, if on average people rate two separate movies 4 stars each. It is likely someone viewing one of the titles will rate the second title highly.

5. Customer Driven

Customer Driven websites have been around for a long time, but only few companies - eBay, craigslist, Digg - have pulled it off successfully. I think part of the reason for this is businesses trying to understand or grasp the concept of putting most of the work in the hands of users. It also lies in the fact that some companies try and control too many aspects of their own organisation that are probably better handled by outsourcing. For example, eBay could source cheap products and handle all the logistics and inventory, but why bother if you can get more for less by outsourcing certain functions to companies whom are already familiar with them.

Content is king on the internet, and you can own that content very cheaply. How much money and time would it take you to build up a library of photos the size of Flickr? Obviously the better solution is millions of users adding thousands of photos for free.

Comments, suggestions, corrections are all appreciated

- Michael