Content Development
Finally, we get back to our series on building multi-million dollar web sites from scratch. We will continue to weave in regular postings about the Google Custom Search Engine developments, but we will begin to write about this topic regularly as well. Basically, this series is a high-level blueprint about how to pursue high-end results. For that reason, we need a high-end strategy. See below for a list of the prior posts on this topic.
This post is going to talk about content development. Let’s start talking about the roles it plays in the process. You are going to need lots of it if you are planning to build a multi-million dollar web site. If your ability to generate reams of content is limited, you may well have to settle for a website that generates a bit less in revenue, but the underlying principles still apply. Here are the major benefits of having significant quantities of quality site content:
- Listed number 1 for a reason: Makes your site more valuable to the visitors you receive
- Helps focus the spiders on keywords for each page
- Provides fodder for ranking on long tail terms
- Makes your site more attractive for other sites to link to
So now that we know some of the ways that content is important, how do we get it? This article will discuss a few ideas on how to do this. We use a few methods for getting content, so let’s look at the four most important ones:
- Government data is wonderful. There are reams and reams of it, on almost any topic imaginable. While remembering that your tax dollars pay for this may be stressful, it’s a wonderful thing from a website development perspective. Much of this data is accessible to you to use, free of charge. Please check any government website you plan to use data from for their particular policies on the reuse of their content.
One major thing you need to be concerned with when you use government data is that leaves you with 4 problems to solve:
- Obtaining it in a form that you can process
- Processing it so that you have it in your own database (or equivalent)
- Presenting it in a manner so that it becomes unique content
- Rendering it onto web pages in a reasonably attractive and useful manner
Solving problems 1, 2, and 4 requires that you have programming capability. We use Perl to do our work here. It’s a very powerful string processing language, and you can develop programs that solve problems 1, 2, and 4 pretty easily. This is a critical issue, and we will talk about this more in our next post in this series.
As for the third issue, if you take the government data and throw it up on a website, you will join a list of others who have already done it – and they probably did it years ago and have a head start on you. Not likely to work. So you need to do something different. But the good news is that there is a lot of headroom here.
Try analyzing the data. Tons of people do this, including very large companies such as the Brookings Institution, do a tremendous amount of work that leverages public government data (while combining it with other research). But you can produce new, unique data, by analyzing the reams and reams of publicly available data.
- Another thing you can do it license the content. There is a lot of content out there that has been assembled by others that are available for purchase at very low cost. In some cases, this is, in fact, government data that has been processed. You can find lots of this stuff, and it can give you real content for your site. The great stuff about this content is that since it is not as readily available to the public, and you may not need to change it so much to publish it (because it may already be unique)
- Look to other publicly available data that is available for reuse. There are libraries of this content that are available via free public license models (such as Wikipedia, which is available under the GNU Free Documentation License). These usually require that you allow people to take and create derivatives of your version of the content. And, of course, before you publish it, you will need to change it yourself before you publish it.
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Write it! People love dealing with subject matter experts. Write endlessly on a topic matter you know a lot about (make sure you are focusing on content quality). Since this is inherently a low volume activity (you can only write so fast, after all), see if you can supplement your writing with contract resources who you can get to write on related topics.
If you do use contract writing resources, make sure you know who they are, and have complete quality control over what they do. We do not use third-party article services to write for us. We use people we know – people whose kids go to school with my kids for example. You can get cheap resources this way and make sure the article quality is up to our high standards. Even with several people on staff, article writing is best used as a supplement to your other content generation ideas.
Summary
So there are a few quick ideas for finding content. Three of the ideas hinge on having the ability to locate large sources of content and then produce something unique out of it, and the other idea requires a lot of manual work. If you can’t get there to process this type of data on a large scale, then think a bit smaller in terms of your financial goals. But the same type of approach will still work on a smaller scale, just with smaller results.
Next up
- Code architecture
- How to get links
- How to monitor results, and what to do about it
Already Published Articles in the Series
- Picking a Market and Content Strategy
- Using PPC to Enhance your Organic Traffic Strategy)
- Site Hierarchy and Keyword Selection
del.icio.us tags: search engine optimization, seo, online marketing, content development
