Goodbye to Article Directories!

Wonder whether something I'm musing over now for my site might work as an effective SEO tactic and be equally beneficial for the sites of other localforums members? Please say what you all think!

I'm planning to transform my site's blog (wot I don't update often enough ) into something that answers visitors career / job search questions (for free) - and still (occasionally) offers blog articles too. I think the initial costs of making this change would be very modest. I provide this kind of service for other sites anyway (eg for the WorkingMums site) so I might as well use it to boost the number of visitors to my own site. It wouldn't be hard to find people wanting free advice with their career and job hunting issues!

I can easily think of other types of businesses which could use the approach if they think it worthwhile - eg pest control; seo consultants; accountants; legal services providers; and so on.

I think it's a brilliant idea. The term "blog" these days is very generalised and getting outdated imho. It can be just content on your site, that users have the ability to interact with, via comments, social sharing etc.

Personally I don't think much has actually changed over the years, other than mindsets and link chasing.

The modern marketing era is all about content and quality, a long familiar message. If that content is deemed to be popular, then people will link to it, or share it socially etc, which is what Google has been saying since the year dot.

If you can encourage interaction on your site, and then promote it out via social media, forums etc, then that has to be better than just putting your hard earned content on an article directory, to be spun, and respun, duplicated, and associated with low grade/quality authors, depending on the quality of the article site.

Likewise, using the same question answer tactic on forums, or communities, maybe linked in Groups, Google communities etc, which should drive traffic and make you seen as the go to person.

As you say, this approach can be adopted by just about anyone. Be the person that can answer the question, and provide the service.

It was such a nice idea ...

Visitors would ask me their career and job hunting questions, I and any other person with a viewpoint would answer them, I'd have all this lovely fresh content for the site and never have to write a blog again ...

I didn't think about hacking risks did I? Or increased ongoing costs?

Anyone want to read a blog post to be called Graduate Unemployment and the Badger Cull? Thought not.

I'll bet there's a plugin or template floating around for wordpress which would do the job and allow you to moderate. Or set up a google community, (or Facebook group or even linked in) that would do the same thing and is free.

But the hard bit is always going to be promoting it and getting people to leave comments.