How to Manage Your Content
Now you’ve got a lot of content written or outsourced, what to do with it? This is an area where I still need improvement. What you want to do with it is carefully organize it so you can find it when you need it.
On your website, you want to be able to publish fresh content regularly to keep your human visitors interested and the search engines happy. It goes without saying that it should be relevant and well-written.
Ideally, you would use a program that could deliver content to your website either on a pre-determined schedule or randomly within parameters the webmaster could set. I’m sure there are a lot of scripts and things that do that, but I will tell you the two best options I’m aware of.
First, I use and love a program called Portal Feeder. You can read my review of Portal Feeder here. I’ll tell you more about how that works in just a minute.
Second, I use WordPress for all my blogs. It’s one of the very easiest ways to create a great looking website that can easily be updated regularly. The site you’re on right now is a WP blog.
With WordPress, you can write content either as a post or a page, and set the time and date you want it to appear on your site. This is great for people who want to set up the next several posts and go take a fancy vacation with their internet marketing millions.
Similarly, what Portal Feeder allows you to do is pre-set your content to be “dripped” to your site over time. You set the interval for publishing new content (number of days, hours, months, etc) and how much content gets published (number of articles) each time. There is a function that randomizes it so you can say you want 1-2 articles published every 3-5 days. This makes your content creation look very natural.
Additionally, what PF does is let you create “article packs” where you input (via import or manual entry) as many articles as you like. While in PF, you can edit your articles, attach keywords to them, add commentary fields, change meta tags, and more. It’s truly a full content management system.
Anyway, that’s enough about that. If you want to know more about Portal Feeder, as I said, you can read my review. Otherwise, get back to that content creation!
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How to Write Your Own Articles
Writing your own articles is the best way to have absolute control over what content you publish. It’s also the cheapest way to get unique, fresh content to your website.
The drawback is that it’s the most time-consuming method. However, with practice, you can get your process down to where it takes minimal time. As with any skill, doing the action is the best way to improve the results.
First, write about something you already know about. That will save you time in research. If you absolutely must write about something with which you are unfamiliar, read 3-4 articles on the subject, then quickly jot down some notes or go right to the actual article writing. Don’t use exact phrases out of the articles you just read, or you could be accused of plagiarism. However, condensing the thoughts of multiple other authors into your own words is not plagiarism, it’s learning and writing.
Second, lay out the basic structure of your article. Each article should have a catchy title first and foremost. The article body should contain an introductory paragraph (tell them what you’re going to tell them), a body (tell them), and a conclusion (tell them what you told them). That is a simplistic structure that you learned in elementary school, but still rings true today.
The introduction and conclusion should only generally be a single paragraph each. The inner body of the article should contain one paragraph for each major point, with no paragraph having more than 7-10 sentences.
People who read articles on the internet don’t want to spend a long time there. If they really want to delve into a subject in thorough detail, they will get a physical book. The article is intended to introduce someone to a subject, or enlighten them on one particular aspect of that subject.
Third, think about the reason for the article. As a webmaster, your goal with articles is to make money. Let’s face it. As a result of a person reading your article, you want them to take some kind of action. That could be clicking on a relevant ad, going to your salesletter, or reading further in your website. You need to consider the purpose of each article as you write it.
Fouth, write the article. Fill in the details from what you laid out. Write in a casual, conversational tone for most articles. There are occasions where you may need to write more scientifically or academically, but not for most web content designed to make you money.
Finally, give the article a quick once-over to check for content, spelling and grammar, etc. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be readable and informative.
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How to Use PLR Articles as Unique Website Content
I wrote last week about some of the sources for unique website content. I want to give you more details on using Private Label Resale (PLR) articles on your website.
PLR websites can give you from a few dozen up to hundreds of articles every month. That can be a great help to the overburdened webmaster who does not have a lot of time to create his or her own content.
However, since most PLR sites have hundreds, maybe thousands, of members, the potential exists to have the same content out on a lot of websites. Whether or not you believe in the duplicate content penalty, using duplicate content doesn’t help anyone — the webmaster or the visitor.
An unwritten internet marketing rule says that the majority of the people who get the articles won’t do anything with them. I have seen that to be true, and I have been guilty of that myself!
If you buy PLR articles, you will need to “uniqueify” them a little before posting them on your site. Experts differ on just how different they need to be, but most agree that it should be at least 25% different.
You definitely MUST change the title. That is the part that will get the most attention from search engines and human visitors alike. As you already know, a good headline is 90% of the attractiveness of the article. Since most PLR comes with fairly generic titles, you will want to rewrite it anyway, just to kick it up a little.
After that, you need to reword the first and last paragraphs. Just type out the paragraph, but use your own words. I like to take it one sentence at a time: I read the PLR sentence, then type one out the way I would say it. Just by doing that one thing, I’m already making that paragraph nearly 100% unique.
In the middle, rewrite a sentence or two from each paragraph. If you can, add some of your own thoughts to help explain an idea a little better than the PLR author, or give an example that would help your reader.
To get the maximum benefit from PLR, I recommend using the technique I just shared to rewrite the entire article. When I began doing that, it was taking me 45 minutes to rewrite a single 400 word article. With a little practice, I have gotten that down to about 10 minutes average to rewrite an article.
That is less time than it would take me to research a topic and write a fresh article, yet it is every bit as unique as far as search engines and site visitors go.
Not only do most people not use the PLR articles they get, the vast majority of the people who do use them will not edit them at all. A few will change the headline and maybe a few sentences.
By taking the time to make your PLR content significantly different, you will have a huge advantage in the marketing world.
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Major Sources of Unique Website Content
Content used by web marketers comes in tightly packaged units called articles. There are a number of ways webmasters obtain articles to use on their site. Here are some of the major ones.
- Write it yourself. This is the cheapest, yet most time-consuming way to create content. It ensures you know what’s being published on your site, and that your article meets your standards (hopefully!)
- Hire it out. This is the least time-consuming way to get articles created, but will definitely cost more. Cheap articles from non-English-speaking ghost writers can still be had for less than $5 each. Better quality articles will normally run closer to $10 per piece. Don’t commit to a huge number of articles until you have tested the writer and found them satisfactory.
- Buy bunches of pre-written articles. This can be more economical, but you often don’t have a lot of say in what gets written, or on the quality of the content.
- Private Label Resale (PLR) articles. There are a number of websites that sell packages of articles on a variety of topics that you can rewrite and use as you please. They are a great way to get good content (again, you need to test for quality) quickly and economically.
I will write further on PLR, because it can be a great way to go, but you also have to be very careful.
Best of luck in creating or outsourcing your unique website content!
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Why Unique Content is So Important
If you have been involved in website creation at all recently, whether as a business or a hobby, you may have heard the saying “content is king.” That’s certainly not unique to the internet, but it definitely applies.
Any webmaster, web author or publisher, blogger, or anyone else interested in sharing their views for all the world to see needs unique content. There is no way around it.
Not long ago, it was not necessary to have unique content. Content itself was enough. You could slap up a bunch of websites that all used the exact same content, and make tons of money. Sadly for marketers, but gladly for the reading and browing public, those days are gone.
Search engines–with Google leading the way–are becoming more and more sophisticated and able to sniff out duplicate content. The infamous “Google duplicate content penalty” is a result of this effort. I say “infamous” because it is still unclear whether or not there is an actual penalty, but many experts believe there definitely is.
Avoiding a duplicate content penalty is only one reason to publish unique content. Another is that it makes a better user experience for your reader. Someone searching for information on buying widgets, for example, is not going to want to go to a bunch of websites that all use the same article. That is boring and repetitive, and you will not gain or keep a visitor.
Think about being a browser yourself. If you were to come across a site that was dedicated to whatever topic you were searching for, and there was new and unique content on it… wouldn’t you read as much as you could? Bookmark it to visit again later? Recommend it to your friends who are also interested in the same subject?
Wouldn’t you also give greater credence to anything that site might recommend? That might include affiliate products or even the ads shown on the site. They immediately have higher credibility because it looks like the site is a higher quality than all the other sites on that subject.
So all you marketers, bloggers, and others… let’s raise the bar, here. High-quality, unique content is the way to go!
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