How to Use User Generated Content in WordPress to Grow Your Business

Did you know that user-generated content can tremendously help you grow your business? User generated content is both relatable and authentic, that’s why it’s a big winner with millennials and Gen Z. In this article, we will show you how to easily use user-generated content in WordPress to grow your business.

What is User-Generated Content?

User generated content (UGC) is the content generated by user activities on your website. This includes comments, testimonials, guest blog posts, user reviews, or any other user submitted content that is publicly visible and was a direct result of user action.

Why is user generated content important?

User generated content is important because it enables your users to directly take part in activities on your website. This boosts user engagement as users spend more time on your website.

Engaged users are more likely to subscribe to your website and buy what you’re selling.

High-quality and useful user-generated content can help you plan an effective content marketing strategy. You can get more traffic, more affiliate sales, and more social reach to a wider audience.

That being said, let’s take a look at different ways to use user-generated content in WordPress. You can use all of them or just the ones that works best for you.

1. Comments

Comments are the easiest kind of user-generated content that every blog can have. WordPress comes with a built-in commenting system that is enabled on all your blog posts by default.

If you run a business website with no blog, then perhaps you should think of adding a blog. You can keep your existing website design and just add a separate blog page to it.

The tricky part is to get your users to comment. Most users usually leave without writing a comment. However, the good news is that there are a lot of ways to encourage more comments. See our article on how to get more comments on your blog posts.

2. Testimonials

Testimonials not only help generate content, but they also add social proof to your website which helps new users into buying.

For a small business website, testimonials have proven to be a very effective marketing strategy. This is why you see them all around the web.

There are several great testimonials plugins that help you easily add testimonials to your site. You can collect user testimonials using a simple form and display them in a slider, sidebar widget, or on a testimonials page.

Our team behind WPForms has done an excellent job in creating a WPForms review page that shows over 2500+ user testimonials.

For detailed instructions, see our tutorial on how to easily add rotating testimonials to your WordPress site.

3. User Submitted Reviews

If you sell or recommend products/services on your website, then user reviews offer a great opportunity to add more user-generated content to your website.

Reviews not only help you keep users engaged, but they also help other users make buying decisions on your website. That’s why you see many niche reviews sites that heavily rely on user submitted reviews to make money online.

Search engines also love reviews and often highlight them differently in search results. This makes the item more noticeable in search results and brings more traffic to your site.

There are several WordPress product review plugins that you can use. You can also create a separate page for customer reviews or display your Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews to get the ball rolling.

4. Guest Posts

Guest blogging is a popular content marketing strategy that helps both the blog owner and the guest author. The guest post author gets exposure and backlinks while you get high-quality content.

The easiest way to do that would be to create a new user account for the guest author. However, this would give the guest author access to your WordPress admin area which many site owners don’t feel comfortable with.

In that case, you’ll need the front-end post submission plugin by WPForms. It allows you to easily accept user submitted posts on your website. These posts are then stored as drafts, which you can then review and publish.

You can also use it to create other types of user-generated blog content such as image submissions (memes, photo contests, etc).

For detailed instructions, see our article on how to allow users to submit posts to your WordPress site.

5. Build a Community

Human beings are social, and we like to interact with each other. You can provide your visitors a chance to do that on your own site by building a membership community.

You can make some of your content members-only to encourage new sign-ups. After that you can encourage discussions, reward users for participation, and even create membership levels with paid subscriptions.

The easiest way to do all that is by using MemberPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin that allows you to build online communities with powerful controls and great flexibility. You can even add it to an existing site without affecting any of your existing content.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to make a membership website in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use user-generated content in WordPress to grow your business. Now that you have users spending more time on your website, see how to easily track user engagement on your website with Google Analytics.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Use User Generated Content in WordPress to Grow Your Business appeared first on WPBeginner.

Source: Wordpres

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How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

Do you want to display social media reviews on your WordPress website? You may have business reviews from your customers on different social sites like Google, Facebook, etc. These reviews are excellent social proof that you can use to attract new visitors towards your business. In this article, we will share how to display business reviews from Google, Facebook, and Yelp in your WordPress site.

Why You Should Display Business Reviews in WordPress?

Your customers often leave positive reviews about your business on social platforms like Google, Facebook, or Yelp. These reviews are excellent social proof and can be used alongside customer testimonials on your website.

You can show these business reviews on your WordPress site to build trust and boost conversions (Bonus: see 29 more ways to use social proof to increase conversions).

Normally, you would need to install separate WordPress plugins to show reviews from multiple social platforms. Each plugin has different settings, and it may even conflict with each other.

We recommend using WP Business Reviews plugin by WordPress. It’s an all-in-one solution to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp business reviews.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Showing Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the WP Business Reviews plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to Reviews » Settings page in your WordPress admin area. Under the ‘License’ tab, you need to add your license key and activate it.

You can get the license key from your account on WP Business Reviews site.

Once the license key is successfully activated, you need to go to the ‘Platforms’ tab and select the review platforms from where you want to display business reviews in WordPress.

Once you have selected the platform, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store the settings.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will select Google, Facebook, and Yelp to pull reviews from. You can choose the platforms that you like.

Next, you need to go to the ‘Google’ tab on the left side and add the Google Places API Key to show Google reviews on your website.

You can login to your Google account and click on the visit Google Places API documentation link to get your key.

It’ll change the platform status from disconnected to connected. Make sure to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to continue.

After that you need to head over to the ‘Facebook’ tab and click on the ‘Connect with Facebook’ button. It will ask you to login to your Facebook account.

Once logged in, you need to give permissions to Facebook for the connection. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Now, go to the ‘Yelp’ tab and click on the create a Yelp App link to get your Yelp API Key.

Click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to change the platform status form disconnected to connected.

After connecting all the platforms successfully, you can go to Reviews » Collection page in your WordPress admin area. From here you need to create the collection of your business reviews.

You can do this by clicking on the ‘Add Collection’ button on any platform to create your reviews collection.

It’ll take you to a new page where you can build a reviews collection.

Start by adding a title and selecting a review source on the right side. After that you need to click on the ‘Get Reviews’ button on a resource to retrieve reviews from the source.

It’ll show all the reviews from this source on the left side of your screen.

Next, you can open the ‘Presentation’ options on the right side. In these options, you can select style, format, maximum columns, and maximum reviews for the collection.

Nextx, you can go to the ‘Reviews’ tab to enable / disable the review components like reviewer image, name, star rating, etc. You can also define the maximum number of characters for each review.

Lastly, you can go to the ‘Filters’ tab. There you’ll find Minimum Rating and Blank Reviews filters. You can select the star rating and show your best reviews to the new visitors.

Once you are satisfied with all these settings, click on the ‘Save’ button and then click on the ‘Copy Shortcode’ button.

You can add this shortcode anywhere on your WordPress site to display the business reviews collection.

This shortcode will show the complete collection of reviews that you created above.

If you want to show a single review on your WordPress post, page, or sidebar widget, then go to Reviews » Single Review page and copy the shortcode of the preferred single review.

You can paste this shortcode anywhere on your posts, pages, or template files to display the single review instead of the complete reviews collection. It also allows you to manually add custom reviews in WordPress.

If you want to show the reviews in a widget area of your website, then you can do this by heading over to the Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress admin and draging the WP Business Reviews Collection widget to the preferred widget area.

Next, simply select the reviews collection in the widget dropdown to show business reviews in your sidebar.

Once you are done, you can head over to your website to see the business reviews in action.

You can create multiple collections of Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews for different pages in WordPress. It lets you customize the style and presentation of all your reviews, so they appear beautifully on your website.

That’s all. We hope this article helped you learn how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to add a customer reviews page in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

Source: Wordpres

The post How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress appeared first on TuneMaster.ml.