Great content — what a terrible, horrible phrase. What, exactly, constitutes great content? Isn’t “great” content kind of like a college (or a high school) literature course? Remember those? You go to this class, and the instructor thrusts a book at you and says, “You must read this and tell me what it means.”
Great. I would read those books, but the meaning I found was never the same as the meaning the instructor found in them. I always got so-so grades in literature because of it, and I still don’t understand. Who is that instructor to tell me what that writer was thinking when he or she wrote that piece of literature? Was the instructor sitting on the writer’s shoulder during the writing process? Or maybe the writer dialed up the future and asked the instructor
for direction on what should be written? Not likely.
Literature is subjective — as is content. What I think is great content might absolutely drive the next visitor to your site completely insane. He could find the article boring or lively, instructing or condescending. Every person interprets what’s put before them differently.
That doesn’t mean that great content can’t be achieved, though. It’s more accurate to call it appealing content — your content should appeal to the majority of visitors that land on that page. The truth is you can’t purchase, steal, borrow, or copy anything that will appeal to everyone. What you have to shoot for is content that appeals to the majority, and there are some guidelines
for writing to the majority of people that will land on any one of your pages.
Knowing your audience
Before you can put anything on paper (or on-screen as is the case here), you have to know who you’re addressing. If you’ve done any targeting research on your Web site, you already have some of this information. If you haven’t, you’d better get to it. The only way you’ll ever reach your audience in the first place is to have a Web site that’s well targeted to them.
Here’s an example: Say you own the Web site Greenparenting.com (in real life, the site actually forwards to GreenForGood.com, but we’re talking hypothetical here). Just looking at the name for that site, you automatically know that the site should be targeted to parents who are environmentally responsible. Now, what you need to know is who those people are. If you know your industry, you can do a little research and find out that the people who would be interested in green parenting are probably upper-middle class adults in their late 20s to early 50s. These are people who fall into the parenting age. Being environmentally friendly isn’t cheap, so a decent income is required to be truly dedicated.
Now you have a profile. Your site visitors have these characteristics:
* They’re parents.
* They’re in their late 20s to early 50s.
* They have a household income of $75,000 or more.
* They’re concerned about the environment.
As you’re reading through those few facts, you should already have a picture of these Web site visitors in your mind. If you haven’t done the spadework necessary to come up with a picture of a typical visitor to your own Web site, do it now. You can’t accurately target anything on your Web site until you know who you’re serving. That includes creating content that your visitors
are looking for and that they want to read.
Language considerations
The language that you use in your content can be addressed on a couple different levels. First, is the what language do most of your readers speak level. Obviously, this level is completely out of your control. It makes no sense at all to create content for your site in English if most of your visitors are Japanese.
If you have any doubts at all about the native language of your visitors, look at your analytics software. Most analytics packages have some element of tracking visitors based on their language. In Google Analytics (which I highly recommend because it’s very user-friendly and FREE!), the actual report is in with a group of reports that segment users according to differing characteristics, such as language location.
A language report tells you the native language of each of your site visitors based on what’s set as the default language in their Web browser. A different aspect of language is the words that you actually use to communicate with your visitors. I can quote you all kinds of facts about how the average person reads at an 8th-grade level or how readers perceive words on a
screen differently than how they perceive words on a page — all that is true. What’s more important to understand about the language that you use to communicate with your visitors is that it should be familiar to them.
Jargon (those words that are inevitably coined for every topic on the planet; really, every topic can be explained with jargon) isn’t familiar. For example, analytics is actually jargon. It’s used to mean Web site traffic statistics. Analytics is actually a derivative of the word analyze, which means to examine critically. So, by definition then, analytics would be the science of analyzing.
Yet, I use it most frequently when associated to Web site traffic statistics. The problem with jargon is that if you stay immersed in a subject long enough, it becomes part of your normal speech and thought patterns. Unfortunately, that might not be true for your Web site visitors.
If you place an article or blog post on your Web site that’s full of jargon and your site visitors don’t view that jargon from the same perspective as you, they’ll get frustrated very quickly. Visitors don’t want to struggle through articles and blog posts filled with terms that seem to be used as part of some coded language. (BBC World War II Upper Class Twit Announcer Voice: “The geese are carrying the potatoes over the vicar’s pond. I repeat: The geese are
carrying the potatoes over the vicar’s pond.”) They want to skim your stuff, pluck out the information they need like the ripest and sweetest grapes, and move on. Jargon slows them down, so don’t use it.
If you do find that jargon is necessary in your content, be sure to explain what it means the first time it appears in any article or blog post. The idea is to make your content as easy to read as possible without being overly simplistic. This is where it gets a little tricky
If you’re too simplistic in the language that you use in your content, most readers are turned off. I find it’s usually best to choose one person that represents your audience and write your content so that person can understand it. For me, it’s my best friend, who happens to be a serious technophobe while at the same time being one of the most intelligent people I know. I write with her in mind, phrasing things in such a way that I don’t insult her intelligence and yet get the fundamentals of (an at times rather complicated) technology across.
If I can write about technology at a level that she understands but that doesn’t grate on her nerves, I count myself successful. Use the same trick with your site visitors. Think of someone you know who represents your readers, assume his or her knowledge of your topic isn’t as deep as your own, and then write to that person. If necessary, you can even ask that
person to read what you’ve written the first few times. If he has questions, he’ll ask. If he understands it and the language doesn’t annoy him, you know you’re on the right track.
Getting Fresh with Content
Here’s a simple exercise for you. Do a quick search on Google for whatever topic interests you. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, just pick something. When the search results come in, click through 20 or so of the results and make note of what you see. How many times does the same article or group of articles appear in those search results?
I bet it’s more than once. I research a lot of topics on the Web, and the one thing that I’ve noticed in nearly every topic is that the same articles appear over and over again. It’s a phenomenon that happens both in print and on the Internet, but it’s far more noticeable on the Internet because information is just a Web search away. In print, you actually have to collect the books and newspapers together in one place to notice the patterns. Everyone uses the same articles. Well, okay. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people do. It’s content syndication (or article syndication), and sometimes it happens on purpose — writers work hard to get their articles and stories syndicated and books published because that’s how they reach wider audiences. Sometimes it happens accidentally though — an article is placed online (it’s less likely to happen accidentally in print), and other Web site owners find it, like it, and either
with permission or without, copy it and use it on their own Web sites. Another reason you see the same article everywhere is because companies exist that sell packages of pre-made Web pages or even just packages of articles that you can place on your Web site that are targeted around a specific keyword or topic. These packages are sold both on Web sites and on auction
sites like eBay, and they’re available to everyone — and I do mean everyone. The problem with that kind of content is that although it’s easy to find and for the most part inexpensive to purchase, it’s old. It’s so old it’s bleu-cheese moldy — which is precisely why you find it everywhere. Nothing’s more frustrating to someone than clicking through a bunch of links looking for information just to find that one-third of those links all lead to the same article on a
different Web site.
If you truly want to generate traffic volume for your Web site (and you do, because the more traffic you have, the more AdSense revenue you generate), fresh content is what you need. Fresh content is new, different, and doesn’t show up on 5,000 different Web sites. It’s your own content that you’ve written or had written for your specific audience to meet their exact needs.
Your Web site visitors will love you for it. Potential Web site visitors are more likely to stay on your site, reading your articles, viewing your other types of content, and eventually clicking your AdSense ads if you’re offering them content they can’t find elsewhere. The only place to get that kind of content is to either write it yourself or hire someone to write it for you.
Article Wrangling
Folks who want to take the easy way out when populating their Web sites with content snatch up as many reprint articles as they can. (Reprint articles refer to that small pool of articles that gets replicated out onto a gazillion Web sites, kind of like that Agent Smith guy in The Matrix.) You can get reprint articles anywhere. A ton of content syndicates are online where you
can purchase articles for a few dollars, but so can everyone else.
You can even use public domain works — those written articles and books for which copyright has expired and thus have slipped back into the public domain. You can publish them without the permission of the author, but again, so can everyone else.
If you want truly original content, you have to do it the hard way — you have to write it or hire someone else to write it.
Creating original content
Writing your own articles and blog posts isn’t as hard as it sounds unless you have hundreds of Web pages to populate, which could become a very time consuming effort. If that’s the case, you’ll have to use some reprints, but it’s still best if you try to keep the most important pages on your site filled with original content.
Coming up with ideas for your original content isn’t too difficult. If you don’t already have a list of ideas based on what you know your visitors are looking for, spend about an hour brainstorming some ideas. You won’t use them all, and some of them will be just plain silly, but you’ll come up with some good ideas. Here’s a secret every writer knows: The more you write, the more
ideas you have. When it’s time to actually write the articles for your Web site, a few basic
principles should be applied. These principles help make it easy for your site visitors to read your articles. The short list looks like this:
* Article layout: The experience of reading on-screen is very different from reading on paper. On-screen, it’s much easier to get lost. Eye strain is also much more common when you focus on a computer screen for too long. Computer screens have an invisible bar that scrolls across the
screen refreshing the image constantly. If you’ve ever seen a computer on TV that has a black line scrolling through it, that’s what I’m talking about.
You don’t see this line because of the rate that it rolls across your screen, but it causes slight vision anomalies that your eyes pick up on, even though it doesn’t register in your brain. These anomalies are what cause eye strain. One way to combat eye strain is to keep your articles as sparse as possible.
That doesn’t mean skimping on the content but does means you need to use lots of white space — open space without words — and use a type font that’s screen-reading friendly.
It works best when you’re laying out your articles if you single space (or even use a space and a half) between each paragraph of type. Also try to keep your paragraphs short and resist the urge to pack everything, kitchen-sink style, into a single sentence. Long sentences are easy to get
lost in.
Between paragraphs, use a double space. The extra white space between paragraphs gives the eyes a second to rest before moving into the new text.
* Reading-friendly colors: Color can be your best friend or your worst enemy online. The first thing to remember when dealing with Web site colors is that colors display differently on-screen than they do on paper — and colors display slightly differently on different screens. So test your
colors in the real world — online rather than on paper. It wouldn’t hurt to take a peek at your Web masterpiece from a few different computers. The second thing to keep in mind when dealing with colors is that computers are already prone to causing eyestrain, so if you use wild colors on your Web site, that exacerbates the problem. Believe me: Nothing’s worse than clicking through a link to find a Web site with a black or dark blue background and yellow type. It’s hard to read and will send your readers clicking back to where they came from.
It’s always better to stick with muted colors, and white or black text. Some of the most successful Web sites online have white backgrounds with black text. These combinations are not only natural, they’re also eye friendly. Even a black background with white text can get tiring
very quickly. So, if you absolutely insist that your Web site have broad swaths of color, try to make it something that you don’t mind staring at for five to ten minutes. If you can’t read a whole article in the color scheme that you choose for your site, find a different color scheme. If
you don’t, your visitors will go elsewhere.
* Titles and headings: Because reading is much more of a chore online, many people don’t completely read everything. Those who do read everything skim a page first just to make sure it’ll be worth their time to read through it. That means you need to catch your visitors’ attention as quickly as possible.
The best way to do that is with your article or blog post titles and headers. Titles are the first impression you get to make with your article. They should be catchy and in a larger font than the rest of the article. It’s also a good idea to make them bold to stand out. Headings are the mini-titles that signal new sections of your article or blog post. Like titles, they should be larger than the text surrounding them (but not as large as the title size) and should be in bold type-face. This makes them both easy to skim and easier to read.
You want your headings to be catchy, but they need to be descriptive as well. It does no good at all to use a header like, “Lost in Space,” when your article is about pruning your prize roses. Readers won’t get it, so they won’t connect the dots. A better heading might be something like
“A Snip in Time.”
There’s an added bonus to using apt titles and headings in your articles — titles and headers are often closely examined by search engine crawlers in their ongoing attempts to correctly categorize your site. The crawler pounces on titles and headings to determine the content on your site, so be sure to fill such elements with appropriate keywords and phrases whenever possible.
* Links within articles: One last element that you should include in your articles and blog posts is links to other, related articles and blog posts, both on your Web site and on others’ Web sites. Linking to other resources provides additional information for your site visitors. Usually,
those visitors will click through those links and then click back to the page from which they came. If you worry about visitors clicking away from your site, never to return, set your links up so that they open in a new window. Opening links in a new window keeps your Web site open
and in front of the visitors. When they’re finished examining the site you’ve linked to, they can close the window and be right back on your Web site.
Another advantage to using links to other resources is that when you create links within your content, you’re adding to your link structure, a facet of your Web site that search engine crawlers consider when ranking your Web site.
Think of a link structure as the framework of links that you create on your Web site. The framework includes internal links — those links that connect your pages within your site — and external links, which lead visitors away from your site. It also includes links that lead to your site from other pages.
Although it’s true that you have a little less control over how many other sites link to your site, don’t underestimate the power of a little you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours negotiating. You can offer free articles to other Web sites that include a link back to your site, for example, or you can just exchange links with other Web sites.
The key is to keep a good balance of the links to other pages on your site and the links to other pages off your site, and work diligently to bring other links into your site from relevant sources. Links from Web pages that are unrelated are much less useful than links from relevant pages. Just remember that having too many internal links or too many external links could be more detrimental than helpful. Try to keep an even mix of internal and external links. Creating your own content isn’t difficult. It can take a little time, but when you get the hang of formatting your articles and blog posts for the Web, it goes faster, making it almost as easy as writing down your thoughts.
You’ll be rewarded for putting out the effort to come up with original content. Web surfers are looking for new, original, and helpful information online. Surfers who log on to the Internet do so for many reasons, but the numberone reason stated by surfers is to find information. If the information you provide is fresh and new, you’ll have more (and higher quality) visitors than
would ever be possible if you were using recycled content.
Hiring someone
Some Web site owners just don’t have the time to write their own content. If that’s you, you don’t have to lose out on the value of original content. Instead of doing it yourself, you can hire someone to do it for you. Hiring someone, of course, means paying them. You can put ads on the Web for writers to produce content for your site for free, but you get what you pay
for. In every case, the writer who’s willing to work for free has no (or very little) experience, and many of them have no talent. That said, exceptions to the rule do exist. Once in a while, you can find a great writer, with experience, who’s willing to work for free because she loves to see her name in print. This might work out for you one-tenth of a percent of the time. The rest of the time, it’s just more headache than it’s worth. You can, however, hire a writer without breaking the bank. Good writers are often willing to work for small amounts of money (say $10 to $50 per article) if the exposure is right, and if the person or company requesting the work pays quickly and consistently. It also helps when articles aren’t too involved. If what you’re looking for is a 1,000 word piece with three interviews, however, you’re not likely to find a good writer to do it for $50. However, if you’re willing to pay $200–$400, you won’t have a problem finding writers.
If you do decide that hiring a writer is the way to go, you need to get (and give) contractual specifications in writing. Even if it’s nothing more than an e-mail that states the guidelines for the article, the size of the article, the due date, and the pay, you have to have something that both you and the writer agree on. Then stick to your side of the bargain. You may encounter writers who say they’ll provide what you’re looking for, but then don’t. It happens, and the only way to be sure you’re getting someone who won’t leave you high and dry is to check references. Treat writers just as you would employees. Make sure they are who they say they are.
Then, be flexible about how the writer goes about writing the article you request. As long as the article is turned in on time and meets the specifications that you set forth in the beginning, don’t bug them about how they get to that point. (Unless plagiarism’s involved — then you must get involved, but there’s more about that near the end of this website.)
One other option that you have — one which could potentially cost you a lot less than hiring a writer — involves inviting guest writers to put together articles for your site. You have to use caution with this method, too, though. Guest writers sometimes write a few articles that they pass around to everyone on the Internet, which makes their contribution to your site not nearly as valuable as if they wrote the article specifically for your site. You can ask for that specificity, though. When you approach a guest writer, nothing’s wrong with asking him to write an article specifically for your site.
Make sure you lay out exactly what you’re looking for, though. Usually it’s okay to ask for the right to publish the article first for a specified amount of time (like six months) before the writer allows others to publish it. You also want to make sure you have the right to archive the article on your Web site so that it remains available to users even after that six-month period (or however long you choose) is over.
In exchange for writing for you, most guest writers want a small blurb or link pointing back to their products and services. It’s usually worth it. In fact, it’s so worth it that many companies have a stable of writers that write these types of articles for them all the time. They offer these articles to all publications that target their own audiences. It saves the company marketing dollars and provides great content for your site.
One caveat when it comes to guest writers: If you plan to use a guest writer, make sure the article that’s provided isn’t too sales-y. When someone comes to your site to read an article, he doesn’t come because he wants to be sold to. He comes because he’s looking for information. Nothing’s wrong with making a recommendation for products or services, and nothing’s wrong with allowing guest writers to include a small paragraph about themselves or their products
and services at the end of the article, but it still needs to be as objective as possible.
A guest writer’s purpose is always to sell something. Whether that something is a product or service, there’s an ulterior motive. It’s your job, as the site owner, to keep that motive in check so you’re not running a big advertising service. Always remember to give your visitors the information that they’re looking for first and foremost. If you do, everything else is gravy.
