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.
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.
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:
Which option do you think sounds better than the other?
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.
