3 Reasons Why User-Generated Content Will Be Hot in 2015

The term “user-generated content” or “user-generated data” has been with us ever since 2005. It was around that time when site owners began experimenting with things like online forums, wikis, blogs, and other ways of letting their audience create content for them (what is user generated data / content).
The results of this were hit and miss (depending on the niche and the audience). And for every great thing about user-generated content, there’s also a handful of problems that need to be dealt with (for instance, the never-ending stream of spam). Either way, even despite those problems, user-generated content is still something you should look into in 2015, especially if you want to build up your site’s authority in the niche.
Here are the three reasons why user-generated content will be hot in 2015.

1. It Lets You Focus on Other Things
The main benefit of integrating some form of a user-generated content infrastructure into your site is that you can earn a lot of your time back, simply by allowing your users to take care of the content creation process for you.
Granted, creating those few articles a month didn’t consume much of your time, but if wanted to ramp up your numbers, doing so yourself would require a bigger time investment.
One of the possible ways of achieving this goal is to create a wiki aimed to explain some of the most pressing issues in your niche, and then inviting your readers to contribute their own articles. Afterwards, you can step in and edit/moderate things (again, spam is inevitable here).
2. It Gets Your Audience Together
What we mean here is that user-generated content is a great community-building tool. If you’ve taken an angle in your niche that lets you reach out to your audience directly and talk about their challenges, you might as well connect the individual audience members with each other.
That way, they will be appreciative of the possibility to connect to other like-minded people, and you get to build a community around your site’s brand.
Also, promoting offers inside such a community can become easier because you’ll have a better understanding of everybody’s needs, and thus you’ll be able to cater more optimized offers to them (by the way, have you checked the CAP Network yet?).
3. It Grows Your “Indexed Pages” Count
The size of your site is an important contributor to your overall Google rank. Of course, it won’t give you a high rank all on its own, but still.
Users tend to create a lot of content once the community reaches a certain critical mass. This depends on what type of user-generated content mechanism you deliver to them, but with a forum, for example, you can see a handful of threads being created every week (or even day).
For instance, when Neil Patel created a forum on his site, it has quickly overpowered his own content in terms of numbers, and after a while, the forum pages accounted for 89 percent of the total page count within his domain.
What Will You Choose?
There are many types of user-generated content you could integrate into your site. Some will give you good results, and others not so much, but it all depends on your niche and your angle in it. So what’s your choice for 2015?