OK, what is 'content'? Simply put, it is informative material that you include in your website or elsewhere to benefit your readers. What's the point of this effort? Providing information, relevant to the subject of your website, is the most powerful way of attracting visitors to you who already respect you as an expert on the subject. In marketing speak they are already 'presold'. If you then recommend them something a relatively large proportion will buy in compared to the average visitor to your site. BUT you must never betray this trust and must always try to recommend only top quality products and services with the readers' interest at heart. Honor this and you will have customers and followers for life. Lets take a look at five ways content builds you traffic, subscribers, and customers in addition to increasing your search engine rankings. 1. Educate, don't sell. Regularly add keyword rich articles and content to your website. Adding a lot of content is good but adding new content regularly much better. Search engines and visitors alike, value your site more if it is kept fresh. Doing this alone will raise your search engine ranking and daily visitor count. For example, if your business involves offering products and services related to food, posting articles and content relating to recipes, food preparation, nutrition, quality suppliers etc will attract unlimited prospective customers on a regular basis! Why? Answer: I want you to always remember this point, which will help you whenever you deal with the search engines: The search engines are in the business of providing accurate and relevant information to their search clients. They do this because the more accurate and relevant the information the more people will visit (and also repeatedly come back to) the search engine and therefore the more money the search engine will make from advertising and other services. This is why the search engines 'love' great, focused, relevant, keyword rich content. Once they find your site and index it (list it), if your content is great, then they will reward you by sending lots of visitors your way for as long as the content remains relevant to their customers. So, give the search engines what they want and you'll get plenty of what "you" want. 2. Excusive reports If your run a newsletter, a powerful technique for multiplying your subscriber base quite easily is to offer content as "exclusive reports" or manuals. But present the offer as a bonus for signing up for your publication. Everyone loves freebies, so give them what they want and get what you want - a massive increase in your results. Just remember, people just like search engines, want 'relevant' information. Keep the subject of your special reports focused and your newsletters well focused too. But if necessary, keep different lists for the different interests/subjects. 3. Training courses. Think about it. What is a training course? Isn't it a collection of informative chapters or sections organized in useful sequence! The beauty of organizing content into a series of lessons, delivered by email is: a) It entices visitors to your website to give you their email addresses and then you can keep in touch, inform and market to them indefinitely. b) It that keeps the reader glued to your serialized training course. Now remember, statistics show that on average, it takes 7 contacts to turn a prospect into a customer. That's why it is so hard to sell to a new visitor to your website. But this technique overcomes that problem very neatly. Note: The technique is really simple and works extremely well but the key to success is 'quality control'. This means you must ensure valuable content is provided in each and every lesson. An extra bonus with this technique is that because you have editorial control over the content, you can links to related websites and also have your affiliate links spread around each lesson or course. As you might imagine by now, valuable lessons will go on being demanded and used for an awful long time. This means you get an automated income stream from the affiliate links for as long as you keep the training material relevant. Tip: Use an 'auto responder' to deliver these courses automatically. 4. Newsletter content. A key ingredient of success online is building a trusting and honorable relationship with the people on your mailing list or newsletter subscribers. In other words you must 'cultivate' your list. With top quality content in the form of articles, delivered through a sequence of emails, you can easily establish yourself as an exert in your filed of business. You gain significant credibility and trust. As a result, once again your subscribers are 'presold' and will take up your products, services and recommendations. Remember this only works if you never, ever, take advantage of the relationship you develop with your list. Avoid the temptation to offer poor quality products or services for a quick profit. There is one thing you can totally depend on in Internet marketing: A mailing list with a well developed relationship to you, goes n producing income year after year. 5. Article submission. A highly productive way to generate fr'ee traffic is by submitting ready-made articles to websites, newsletters, article directories, online journals etc. At the end of each article you can attach 3-6 lines of text known as your 'bio' or 'resource box' or 'About the author'. In this you write a little abut yourself and include a link to your website or subscription email address ... See mine below. At the time of submitting your articles for publication specify that each article is to be published "as is" with your resource box attached. Even one or two articles can go miles towards generating tons of traffic and visitors for you without spending a cent. You can easily send your article to newsletters that have subscriber bases of 100,000 individuals or more and many will click your website link to find out more about what you are offering. So you now have 5 powerful ways to develop your business but just one of these can explode your site popularity and profits with top quality content. Let me leave you with a valuable thought on this subject: We've all heard "... give and you shall receive...". And it is so true when it comes to providing useful information to others on the Internet. Think of it this way: you will be proving your worth to your target market, right? Now, think about this question as a potential customer would: Which is more powerful, lots of clever adverts from a company you know nothing about or just some plain-speaking but valuable information from someone or a company that proves useful to you and establishes its credibility? There is simply no contest. Here's one final hidden gem for you: how long does an advert stay current? Answer: Just one issue of whatever publication of course. How long does a valuable article last? Answer: At least many months but most probably years! Yes, years. Most publications and web sites maintain a readily accessible archive of their published material usually available to all visitors and search engine spiders for years to come! This will ensure a steady flow of visitors via search engines as an added bonus. But there's more: with links from (your resource box in) each article back to your site, the search engines will reward you with higher rankings. And remember that when it comes to distributing content you have an army of allies out there numbering into at least thousands for the most obscure of subjects - they eagerly want to distribute your information because they too will gain similar benefits to you. A win-win situation for all. |
