SB Informer
Friday, August 31, 2007; 03:46 AM
Sitesell.com, the originator of Site Build It! and champion of using quality content to drive small business sites, today takes Web 2.0 to new heights. For the first time, small businesses can make it easy for their visitors to craft original Web pages including photos and captions. Other visitors comment upon and rate those Web pages. The process is optimized for search engine results driving long tail keyword traffic and viral spread.
"Up until now," says Ken Evoy, president of SiteSell.com, "Web 2.0 has been the playground of large companies which basically aggregate individuals and small businesses. Today, small business owners have the simple, powerful ability to increase content through others and use it to grow traffic and 'buzz' tremendously."
Web 2.0 is a catchall term for user-generated content and interaction with viral spread. It has created legendary business success stories such as MySpace, flickr, and YouTube. But they are all 'big company' stories.
"Small business has been shut out of Web 2.0," states Evoy. "They are limited to blogging and using YouTube and MySpace to increase traffic and revenues in small ways. Now they become 'aggregators' instead of 'aggregatees.' Blogging pales because the site owner still has to create all that content. With C2, visitors create original, high-value content, a tremendous leveraging of time and results."
The depth and breadth of user-created content yields surprising results. At Wikipedia, contributors do the work, building new pages of keyword-rich material. Wikipedia gets the benefits of content and inbound links. Millions of Page 1 rankings at Google have pushed it to the 9th most visited site in the world (according to Alexa.com).
Evoy contends that what he calls "the rest of us" do not have the resources to create Web 2.0 platforms. Over one year in the making, Content 2.0 is that platform. SiteSell clients are already using it to create their own mini-MySpaces or to turn sites into super-blogs, inviting recipe submissions, beer reviews, etc. A ghost story site has even created BooTube, which invites video submissions. In SiteSell's forums, users are already showing traffic stats that have doubled.
Web 2.0 and so-called "user-generated" content has its detractors. They cite everything from the unreliability of Wikipedia and uncontrolled "splogging" (spam blogs) to widely publicized issues on MySpace. Evoy says that all those problems stem from the lack of reasonable forms of control. "We studied all the major Web 2.0 companies, took the best, eliminated the worst, and then made it all simple to use."
"You need an authority to maintain quality. Users of Content 2.0 cannot continuously overwrite each other like at Wikipedia. They don't create 'Profiles' and gossip like at MySpace. And they do much more than just upload photos. They build real value, content which an owner can easily control and monetize. That control is key."
Just like the large Web 2.0 successes, visitors who participate are notified when theirs page have been published and when comments are posted about their pages. They comment back and forth on the site and are encouraged to spread the word through e-mail. Repeat visits, community and viral spread are the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
"Content 2.0 is automated, regulated, high-quality Web 2.0," continues the passionate Evoy. "Like our flagship, Site Build It!, the complexity under the hood is intense. And 'under the hood' is where it belongs. Our small business customers never have to look there. They just focus on doing business."
Evoy sums up "Small businesses have been the aggegatees for years. The money is in being the aggregator. Now they can do it, in their niches, with quality and ease."
Content 2.0 is available at SiteSell.com for the annual subscription price of $99 as an add-on module to Site Build It! (SBI!), SiteSell's flagship business-building product.
For more information on SBI!, please visit http://www.sitesell.com.
For more information about other recent SBI! innovations, please see http://buildit.sitesell.com/main/tools.html#NEWFEATURES