Trusted UGC: Recommendations to Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Posted on 30. Sep, 2009 by Franz in Management
For those of you who do not know Rand Fishkin well – Here’s a scoop for you.
Dear Rand,
I thought the tweets that I sent was a little too short to explain what I mean, so I’m writing a short note and some visuals for you to fully understand what I mean. First off, let’s start with the ‘can-be-seen’ resources you currently have.
- Your brand is on top of the world – I’m not over-praising, but you get what I mean. You probably already know what this can do for you. A lot of small companies like mine may not be able to do this thing I’m about to recommend you.
- You have truckloads of research tools and merchandise. Kills off a lot of your competitors because brand trust is first (or arguably second) when it comes to usage/purchase on products for many kinds of demographics; I believe yours is.
- You have the Marketplace, which is ‘already’ a list of people you can start exploring first. Some companies may just place their contracts or job postings there for the ‘domain mention’. I’m sure you already know the (rel=’nofollow’) can only do so much and we don’t own SEs’. But you can look for eligible contributors there based on your kind of evaluation.
In this article, I will not discuss conflicts of interests, individual economic and socio policies, SWOT analysis and future business interests.
The Idea
I said the idea was “Trusted UGC”, which literally means ‘evaluated’ registered members promoted to TRUSTED and given a tag on their profile. NOT plain registered members. Look at Alibaba.com and Lelong.com.my – These sites require some sort of ‘evaluation’ for the PRO members (and to also get a PRO tag) so that they know, they can keep the quality for serious businesses who wants to trade online. The rest are just hypes for the media and brand building capacities (and in some cases, fraud).
The same concept goes. What you and your team can do is look for serious, credible, committed professionals in the SEO industry that will help you guys take some load off ‘thinking and writing and editing’ all the time. And the benefits are:
- Instead of having just 20-30 SEOmoz-influenced minds, you’re inviting creative ideas, concepts, experiments, suggestions and comments from industrial professionals around their demographics, community and space. This makes SEOmoz.org/blog think out of the box.
- It reduces editorial time – With Dr. Pete, Scott, Will, yourself (and other mozStaff)’s time combined, that’s a lot of individual editorial time. With entries from Trusted UGC members, articles need to only pass ONE (1) editor (or probably another assistant). You and I know how expensive time cost is. Previously, Rebecca sifted through my UGC articles.
- This also encourages greater reach in the social space for your blog. Also, you gain more editorial links and/or link opportunities while setting greater presence in niche communities through your Trusted UGC members. Industrial leaders in their particular location (e.g. Some parts of Russia, China and other parts of Asia Pacific) have greater influence on their own community than you do.
- A brand of your size will not have problem making huge dents in your community’s minds. And as the network expands through Trusted UGC (and these proud members), your intellectual value and social influence will improve drastically by location.
Benefits to Trusted UGC members & Community
- Increased brand presence in a well-known community. (And the SE linkage properties part that I do not need to explain)
- Encourage debate-able content that the SEOmoz community alone may have overlooked, know but don’t remember or don’t realize. This improves SEO practice and understanding among professionals and amateurs.
- Use SEOmoz’s Trusted UGC user profile/articles/discussion pieces/testimonials/comments as a profile during presentations as an editorial advantage (value can be similar to editorial testimonials if put properly).
- Obtain more business requisitions for SEO services. (I think this will not be a problem for SEOmoz since you said a long time ago you’re charging $1000/hour).
- Semi-promote their own products (such as Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Book) while providing content to SEOmoz. I’m sure the SEOmoz team is good at controlling and regulating this ‘facility’.
The Business/Corporate Mix
When you read the ideas below, don’t look only at SEOmoz. Look at your clients: How they can expand, benefit from your community, benefit from your brand strength, secure alternative revenue streams and increase their presence corporate-style.
- I presume some would think the value of PRO section will go down. I don’t think so. PRO members enjoy many other benefits such as Q&A, unlimited use of tools, downloadables, insights from mozStaff and so forth. This Trusted UGC is only dedicated to channel different points of view from industrial professionals, therefore shouldn’t affect the quality of PRO section that much.
- Increased reach + brand trust from different continents and niche communities will increase visitor volatility & activity in your mozStore (PRO content purchases, SEO consulting services, affiliate programs, etc.). There are some corporate companies from Malaysia (that I know of) are taking SEO services from as far as Canada. Believe it – We’re living in a 3rd world country.
- It encourages corporate partnerships worldwide (or locally out of Seattle like Distilled) & extended Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes.
- Your “SEOmoz Recommended” tag can carry a lot of weight in many different industries out of SEO – And sometimes even be monetized. I’m not going into business transactional and operational details here. You should get what I mean.
- Opens up many investment opportunities (and/or shelf company purchases) as part of your aggressive growth practices. This is because once you reach out to greater communities, a lot of investment ideas come your way. Definitely.
- Opens up IPO opportunities for foreign currency – Not just the NESDAQ. You should be looking for IPO if you’re looking to expand. It’s cheaper in Asia and the exchange volatility is much higher. But if you want to retain as a non-IPO community/company, feel free.
A small thought…
Recently, I submitted my will to write for BlogCritics.org, but after they bombarded me with more than 50 regulations to follow, 5 ‘must-do-or-don’t-qualify’ that will benefit themselves and their sponsors first, I figured I’d rather spend this time preparing presentations for my clients and prospectives rather than join the thousands of writers there, be more susceptible to spam messages and gain low quality traffic that wouldn’t probably benefit any of my clients.
I hated it. Vouched to never apply again unless they take a lot of these regulations off. Things like these will limit my creativity because I will be clouded with regulations that I don’t need to care about. I mean, that’s BlogCritic’s problem if they want UGC. Not mine. Why pass these regulations to me and put me off?
Sure, you could also launch a recommendation question and ask your community in particular about whether they think this is a good idea.
And lastly, Rand…
I’ll greatly appreciate it if you could at least send me a reply to tell me what you think of the idea. You can tweet me, email me or comment below if you’d like to – You choose.
Thank you.
