First of all, why would you want to build content-rich websites? The short answer is “Because it keeps people on your site for awhile, it makes them come back, and they tell their friends about that site.”
People will stay on a content-rich site because it takes awhile to read an article or two. Thus, while they’re reading the material, their peripheral vision (off to the sides) notices little ads that happen to surround that articles.
And if people start to realize that a certain site has good content that they like, and in particular, different content that constantly changes and is updated, then they’ll check back to see what’s new.
The worst thing in the world to have is a stagnant website that never changes. People will visit it exactly twice—the first time to check it out, and the second one to see what’s changed—and when they find out it hasn’t changed, they most likely won’t come back. Ever.
Creating useful content is also one of the most effective ways to build a linking campaign. Many authors create big amounts of content because they think it should help them for low cost. The problems with adding, for example “rebrandable” articles are:
• since the articles exist elsewhere yours probably will not rank as well as the one of the other copies on the web.
• your site looses interest of visitors, therefore you loose focused customers
• it lowers the quality and functionality of the web as a whole.
Some people may say, the above mentioned is against wide used strategy of content generation. Although I am against generating low quality automated content as I suppose many people may find it effective for generating traffic.
Tons of tools are on the market which scrape various RSS feeds and mix them to create many content pages. Some people also clutter up the internet with search result screen scrapers and other auto content generation crap.
A content-rich site is one that has lots of informative articles up at it, usually centered around a theme. Most sites can’t quite pull off being WikiPedia, so they specialize. For instance, you could do a site about biodiesel, like another of mine. Possible articles on that site would cover:
· Biodiesel technology
· How much it costs
· Types of bio fuels
· Where to buy biodiesel
The articles you’ll want to have on your site should be short enough so that someone can read them in about 5 minutes. This means you want to stick to articles of 250 to 750 words, with 300 to 600 words optimal. To give you an idea, a single page in a published novel has about 300 words.
Of course, your real purpose in putting up all these nice little short articles and changing them out frequently is not to just put information out into the world. It is to have a site that people will come back to so that they will see the Google AdSense ads, and click on them, and then you will get checks in the mail.
You should forget about lots of cool graphics and colors that make a site attractive to a visitor. The very best way to attract and retain an online audience is to provide content that’s useful, valuable, informative, educational or just downright funny as hell or entertaining in some way.
1.2 How to create one ?
Anyone can create a content-rich website without being an writer at all. Just following a few key points:
· Constantly maintaining site.
· Updating site often. Having a schedule is best.
· Be able to beg, borrow, or commission content
1.2.1. Constant work.
To create a content-rich Website, you need to hone your focus and your self-discipline. I don’t have to tell you how incredibly easy it is to waste hours, even days, just surfing around the web from one site to another. Successful writers can’t afford to wait for inspiration to strike before starting work. Instead, they develop a writing schedule for themselves and they stick with it like it was their job—since it is. As one famous writer said, “I write when I feel like it. And every morning at 9am, I make sure I feel like it.” Schedule a time for yourself to sit down at your desk and write.
1.2.2. Regular updates are critical to your site.
Nothing is deader than a website that looks like somebody’s forgotten about it. Regularly updating or modifying your site content gives you a big advantage over the competition. Web surfers will keep on coming back to your site if they notice that there’s always something new to see, learn, or enjoy each time.
1.3 Selecting content
Start from the audience. If you know them, so you know what you are talking about.
For instance, if you’re talking about biodiesel; it’s because you produce it. So you know what other biodiesel people are like, and what they want to know and what they find interesting. The rest is to frame your work around existing content categories:
· Editorials
· Feature articles
· Political opinion
· News stories
· Art galleries
· Content conglomeration
· Movies, books, music reviews
· Interviews
· Interactive features - polls, feedback, discussion groups, forums, chat
1.3.1. Editorials
Editorials are the opinion of someone who’s seen as an expert in the field. This makes good content because people like to respond to it, either by agreeing with or opposing the writer. Give your people a way to make their views known; put up a bulletin board or guest book on your site. People will come back to read other responses to their comments. And you can use this feedback from your audience by incorporating it into a follow up article in the future.
1.3.2. Full-length articles
This one of the best forms of content. Depending on what your site is like, the articles could be long or brief, formal or chatty, technical or entertaining.
Here are some tips:
· Keep it short, say below 1200 words. If they are longer, make them into multi-part features. People hate to have to scroll down a lot.
· Articles should be relevant to your site.
· Articles ought to educate, entertain or inform. Don’t overwhelm people; stick to one or two ideas.
· Publish something new and useful, so it will up the value and credibility of your site.
To write the article you can:
1. To hire guest author. Make sure you get exclusivity. When someone writes for you, make sure they won’t submit that same article to dozens of other websites and newsletters.
2. Exchange articles with another site. Your site visitors benefit by providing them with another point of view. And you might just gain some new regular visitors from your guest author's site!
3. Use reprints, making then personalized. Write an introduction to the subject, or comment on the author's opinions or conclusions. Take care to avoid 'editing' the original article without the author's permission. Avoid articles that have been reprinted many times before on other websites and electronic publications.
1.3.3. Political Opinion
Using political opinion on your site can be tricky. People are deeply divided these days and have strong opinions. If you do run a political site, you’ll probably want to carve out your own niche. Even then, be prepared for flamers from very different view points.
On the other hand, if you can manage to run a site that actually features a somewhat well-mannered debate, you’ll have a huge hit on your hands. Be prepared to moderate this type of site.
1.3.4. News Stories
Your site can become a news source for the latest developments and happenings in certain niche area by providing timely news on topics of interest to your readers. I’m not saying you can be the next CNN or MS-NBC, because that takes building a huge operation. But what you can be is, for example, the CNN of biodiesel technology. So you can create a page in your site containing industry news. Or you may devote an entire site to news updates. There are many ways of presenting news:
· As a feature article
· As short news clips, with a link to the full story
· As news stories, where each item is explained at length
You cay make your news section attractive for readers or just serving as an additional service. The easiest way is to incorporate into web page specific RSS feeds from reputable news provider.
RSS works so well that a lot of site owners swear it stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. Why is it simple? Because you just select the content you like and have it delivered directly to your site. I use Google feeds in the news page of this site.
To get them is to register it at the various aggregators, and start watching your traffic really spike. This happens because now any site can grab and display your feed regularly, which will drive traffic straight to your site.
It gets better—if you update your RSS file, all the external sites that subscribe to your feed will be automatically updated. If you use RSS feeds, they’ll work together.
The only downside is that most of the free RSS feeds are news-oriented or entertainment-oriented, so if you run, say, a site that focuses on the latest video games, your audience may not really care that they can get the latest news streaming in there.
Summing up this topic, to build news page you should:
· Sign up for eZines, RSS, other news delivery services
· Surf the web for news
· Get news from offline
· Visit conferences, workshops, seminars and write about what you see and who you talk to
1.3.5. Content conglomeration
If you can make your site into the ultimate content resource on issues related to your topic, you’ll attract and retain a loyal audience. For this you can evaluate sites and other resources (eZines, directories, books, offline publications) and sniff out the best ones to list along with your rating and opinions. This sort of content is like the old book reports you used to have to write for school. Read up thoroughly on your subjects, then hit the high points of a topic. Or, consider writing a summary of three separate article that have the same theme.
1.3.6. Reviews of movies, books, music
This is perhaps the easiest category to get content for. If you have friends who are movie, book, or music fans, they’ll probably write reviews for free just for the thrill of seeing their stuff on a site.
1.3.6. Interviews
This is a category you might want to get a freelance writer for. Go to elance.com and browse the profiles of Service Providers to see who does interviews, then talk to them. Many freelancers specialize in celebrity interviews, and that’s what you want.
1.3.7. Interactive features - polls, feedback, discussion groups, forums, chat
This is one of the most popular types of sites for kids, teens, and young adults because they get to give their opinions (which many kids don’t get to do enough of at home, according to them) and they get to talk to others.
So, if you want to run this kind of site, bear your target market in mind. It’s worth paying a few bucks to a freelance writer or graphic artist to come up with fun games that are constantly changing, or new polls, since people will come back time and again to give their opinions. And don’t forget surveys—people love to take surveys.
1.3.8. Copywriting
Do not forget about target audience: internet surfers, who need short, relevant and interesting information, so stick to basics of online copywriting:
• Use varying style, do not use corporate speak like: “we are focused on creation additional value for customers willing to obtain the high quality …”
• Be yourself
• Make it a conversation: These are persons behind everything. Write in a conversational tone as a person, not a company. Fake fluffery does goes bad on the web.
• Make your point clear and understandable. Use bullet points to explain it in a few words.
• Be professional, do not use jargon:
• Do not use wordings: “contemporary trends of modern biodiesel production technology require thorough research and development in the field of utilization of…”
• Break up text using headers, sub headers, bulleted lists, and other text breaking devices.
• Underline product or service benefits before features.
Start headlines, paragraphs and links with the most important words. The first words should communicate the subject of the headline, paragraph or link. This is not like writing a novel or a story, where you have time to be coy and not get to the point for awhile. You’ve got about a quarter of a second to grab that user’s attention or he won’t read the rest of the sentence. Make the most of that opportunity.
If you do this, and you frontload your writing, especially at the top of the page, user’s eyes will easily catch the most important info, and they’ll keep reading.
Here are some examples of good frontloading:
· Madonna release new cd
· Barbeque beef ribs recipes everyone will like
· Tom Cruise stars in a new movie
Here are some bad examples that are not frontloaded:
New cd is being released, it’s by Madonna
Everyone will love these great new recipes for barbeque beef ribs
New movie is coming out and it’ll star Tom Cruise
1.4. Highly paying keywords
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1.5. Extreme content.
Extreme content refers to very large sites ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000…even 300,000 pages. Of course, not all of the 1,000 pages will rank in the top 10—there’s not room, by definition—but you’ve got a better chance that some of them will. And when you get all that traffic streaming into your site, you can direct them to your main site by using pop-unders or links and articles on those pages. Here’s what you can put in this kind of site:
· Articles – be sure and organize them by categories. Otherwise, it’ll be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And it’s critical that they be SEO keyword-rich.
· Web forums – people love forums where they can discuss things, so give them a place to vent and have their little flame wars.
· Polls – people also love to be asked their opinions, so give them a place to express it, even if it’s just a multiple-choice poll.
· Games – a huge number of people love to play games.
So what sort of strategy do you use to create an extreme content site? Well, for one thing, you don’t try to do it at once. Having said that, though, if you think you want to go extreme, make sure you set up a basic structure that allows for expansion.
Start small, but leave room to grow. For instance, start out with a ten-page site that stays on one topic.
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