How making predictions can build traffic and generate revenue

One of the fundamental goals of having a website is getting people to visit it - in other words, building traffic. The best way to do this is to provide plenty of unique, interesting and engaging content that establishes you as an expert, trustworthy or someone worth listening to in general.

That's not easy to do because everyone else out there is trying to do exactly the same thing. This gives rise to the current Internet predicament:

There are several important facets to producing content that enhances your reputation and builds traffic:

• Engaging - what you talk about should be exciting, stimulating and conversation worthy
• Focussed - what you produce should relate to your business objectives
• Clear - content must do what it says on the tin
• Relevant - don't waste effort writing about something that isn't of interest to your target demographic

By producing content that adheres to these guidelines, it is possible to establish yourself a leader in a given field. But not all content is created equal. Some content is more interesting than others. Letting people know what your really think, is far more valuable than regurgitating content you have read somewhere else.

But how do you go about creating content that is entirely unique? I'm sure many of you know that it's not as easy as it sounds. The answer is:

It's easier to do this than you think using a social network that is designed to meet this precise need. topulo.us is a socially integrating platform for creating and sharing predictions on any topic. It can be used to instantly share your vision for the future and use them to build credibility by providing exciting new ideas (that are also hopefully accurate).

topulo.us allows you to follow other predictors to see what they think is in store for the future, as well as create and join competitions. Competitions are an excellent way to build hype and buzz around the brand or business that sponsors them. By getting people to engage in relevant or fun thought exercises, businesses can garner excellent exposure.

Predictions on topulo.us cannot be edited once saved to the site - for obvious reasons. But, you are able to add an explanation for your prediction, a date (for when the prediction is to come true), and reference links (which can be used to build backlinks to your website).

Take a look at this sample prediction that concerns the longstanding rivalry between two popular open source CMS websites. Within hours of posting, this prediction has already been posted to plenty of sites interested in this sort of content... for example this posting on spreaddrupal.org.

Note in particular that there is plenty of social integration allowing predictions to go viral, as well as ratings and comments to spark debate and create hype and buzz around the subject. There's also links to your full online profile that can be used to build your network of followers (This along the lines of 'John's stock brokerage' where John has 300 000 followers on topulo.us).

Making predictions is one of the easiest, quickest and effortless methods of providing exciting, engaging, socially integrated, link building, SEO enhanced content for your website or blog