After first launching a new blog or website the next step would be to generate content. There are a number of ways to do this, either blog posts or internal pages or a mix between the two. This can be referred to as your “content strategy” for building up valuable information within a new project launch.
I want to share a few tips and ideas for creating high-quality website content. Also consider the other various pieces to content generation like scheduling, marketing, and SEO. To launch a product online and garner some success you will need to learn the best formulas for creating likable content.
Just Keep Writing
There are many stories of webmasters attempting to keep content online which then goes down 6-12 months later. Content generation by a webmaster is about long-term traffic and requires a lot of dedication. This means you have to keep practicing and writing new headlines or webpages, even if things don’t seem to be going well.
Google loves to crawl websites and organize new content for search results. Without doing keyword research you’ll never know who is ranking for which keywords and how much competition is out there. It is obviously smart to test these things in Google, but if you just keep writing on various topics eventually you can find a niche to fill.
Visitors will not usually care if your content is in a blog format or a webpage. Blogs are often easier because the content is archived based on year, month, category, and other bits of metadata. But planning your content strategy is also about planning how users will find your content. Think about the exact purpose of your site and how visitors should be viewing your content on the screen.
Target Markets
Each website is usually geared towards a very specific audience or subject matter. These are called niches which are comparable to markets, basically any subject that can drive traffic. There are many subjects like blogging or web design that have become saturated by so much competition.
You want to find markets which do not have much content in Google. Granted if you target a very small market then you can’t expect a whole lot of results, because only a limited number of people will bother searching for these keywords. It helps if you can target a large number of smaller markets and write content geared towards many niche categories.
This way you are providing a real service to Internet users and to Google. You can practice writing content on easier subjects which do not have a whole lot of competition ranking in search engines. From this process you can also learn about marketing and how to setup posts/pages for driving more interested traffic. Spend the extra time planning and then targeting your audience, and make sure you know what you are writing about.
Pretty Page Aesthetics
One really important feature I like to mention is your website design. Marketing gurus don’t often worry about having pretty templates, but all of the largest websites online are well-designed. This is not by coincidence. If you want to rank and keep an audience then make sure you have a good-looking theme.
It doesn’t need to be super complicated or have a bunch of widgets running on the homepage. You just need an interface to convey information to your visitors. This information could include images, static webpage text, videos, or any combination of the three. A beautiful catchy logo paired with a memorable website favicon can go a long way towards building credibility with your audience.
Marketing & Analysis
To really understand your content strategy it takes studying the results of your labor. Try picking out some of your best work and submit these links into Reddit, StumbleUpon, or some other social networks. See how your content is received by people and try to gather as much feedback as possible.
You can also sign up for Google Analytics and check some of these results. Once you are gathering 200+ uniques per day the results will be much more accurate. You can see which pages garner the most attention where people are staying for a long time, and which ones are not keeping people’s attention at all.
Study what isn’t working and you can learn how to do it right. There is no one-size-fits-all solution because each market is different. People are fickle and they consume information differently based on what that information is about. The best way to learn how you should be publishing content is by practicing and researching what has worked in the past. Try to understand why readers are currently driven to other websites like TechCrunch or RWW.
The reason your content strategy will succeed is mostly through search engines. This is how average Internet users find stuff without going to a social community like Reddit. You want to be publishing unique and valuable content to rank in Google for certain keywords which also don’t have much competition. It is a systematic ideology you can follow to almost guarantee some positive results – the biggest problem is finding your perfect niche and staying consistent with publishing.
Final Thoughts
Although this is not a complete set of ideas, I really hope this article can help writers and webmasters when putting together copy on the Internet. Understanding the basic principles of what drives interested traffic is a cornerstone to the success of your website. And it’s actually not as difficult as you would think! Try playing around with many different website ideas and figure out a content publishing strategy that works best for you.
