How to get ahead with your own Web 2.0 site

Do you want to set up your own web 2.0 site? Firstly your website must be interactive, so you need to encourage visitors to interact by asking them to post for example comments, articles, Audio, user generated blogs and videos. These videos can either be uploaded directly to your website or they can be YouTube videos. 

If you choose to host the videos yourself you could soon end up using a lot of bandwidth so the YouTube option is good but you will have the YouTube branding on the videos.

At first with web 2.0 you will have to put in some hours to get the site uploaded, drive traffic to the site, moderate the site and encourage other users to interact. However after a while when you have enough visitors you will find that the site grows on its own as more users start to interact with each other, chat, inviting new people and posting content, so all you have to do is go in and make sure everything is running smoothly. To make this happen and get your site to grow quickly you simply need to tell users exactly what they need to do, make it easy for them to upload content, maybe even have some simple training videos for how to use the site, put buttons and links in positions that will be easily visible etc. Initially, to give the site a kick start you can create a few user accounts yourself and post some comments, invite friends and family to join in and post, this will get the ball rolling quickly.

Next you want to be active in the community, add your own content and interact with visitors to brand your name to the site. It will be very important that you become proactive at stopping spam and inappropriate content. As your site grows, particularly when it becomes popular you WILL get spammers and you need to deal with this as soon as possible. You can set up the site so that there is a way for people to report spam and inappropriate content also you should be proactive in moderating the site your self also, don't only rely on the users to report spam, but expect that your users will not be impressed if the site becomes full of spam and adult links etc that they don't want to see.

Make certain the site has plenty of fresh content and information. Make it easy for visitors to invite their friends from their email address book or Facebook friends and other social networking sites by adding buttons to recommend to a friend (a quick search on Google for social bookmarking tools and you can have a button for numerous sites all in one). Another thing you might want to consider is rewarding visitors for posting, this could be in the form of a free ebook download or other gift for the best post each month or maybe a monthly draw or something along those lines.

Remember you are building a list of members and it is an absolute must that you get their name and email so that you can market to them! This kind of members list in a particular niche will be quite responsive to the right offers.Secondly of course don't forget that you can earn from advertising on your site this can be from Google AdSense or other PPC companies or banners for your own affiliate marketing promotion and as your site grows and you get lots of visitors you can sell advertising space on your site for whatever price suits you or works best, once you get to a certain level of traffic people will be happy to buy advertising space from you. This is just the start of your Web 2.0 site there is so much more you can do with it which we will go over in another Web 2.0 article.