"Creating Content: The Easy Way"

By Steve Shaw
Posted Sunday, November 7, 2004

There is little doubt that quality content has a number of real benefits for your web site, not least increasing levels of repeat visitors, and valuable revenue streams such as advertising and the sale of products or services related to the content you provide.

The only difficulty is that creating such content can be costly, taking up valuable time and resources. This article examines different ways you can add content to your web site quickly, giving you maximum benefit for the minimum cost.

Syndicated Content Streams

Syndicated content is content provided by others for use on your web site. Certain sites provide 'content streams', where you can simply place a few lines of code on your web page, and forget about it. The content provider then regularly updates the content it provides. The end result is that your site remains fresh and dynamic, at virtually no cost to you.

The content provider either charges a fee for the privilege of using their content, or they prefer to benefit through traffic, such as by placing a link adjacent to or within the content. One provider at interestalert.com even offers to pay you for adding a news feed to your site.

Here are a few examples of some content providers you may wish to try: (http://www.1afm.com/free_content/) - provides a range of different content types such as news headlines or jokes. (http://submityourarticle.com/syndicate) - a number of different content feeds you can add to your site, displaying articles relating to internet marketing and online business. (http://www.brainyquote.com) - adds 'quote of the day' to your web site, from a range of different topics and authors. (http://freesticky.com) - an index of resources you can use to quickly add content to your site, with a wide range of content areas to choose from.

Free Reprint Articles

Free reprint articles are a type of syndicated content, and they are widely available.

The benefit for you is the provision of quality content on your web site, attracting targeted visitors via inbound links from the search engines. The benefit for the author of the article is their name and URL in the resource box (or 'author bylines'), which builds up targeted traffic to their web site, and builds up their 'brand' and online credibility.

Here are just some places where you can find articles to quickly put up at your web site: (http://articlecentral.com) (http://goarticles.com) (http://ideamarketers.com)

Invite Content

Add a page to your web site where you invite your visitors to submit their content, in return for a link back to their own web sites. This will give you a steady stream of content you can choose from, and save you time in searching for it elsewhere.

As a twist on this, if you create original content on your own site, make it easy for visitors to use it on their own sites - remember, many of your visitors will be actively or passively looking for content for their own web sites. Just make sure they always include a link back to your site in return, so that you stand to benefit too.

Over time, as well as increasing the amount of content on your own site, providing your content to others will gradually but significantly increase your traffic levels, and is far more effective than the more popular 'link swapping' craze, that usually just leaves your link sitting unclicked in an unvisited links page.

The common phrase is that 'content is king' - the Internet is a content-driven medium, and the more successful web sites are those with the best content. By using some of the techniques above, you can increase the amount of quality content on your site with the minimum amount of effort and expense.

Steve Shaw creates systems and software for effective e-marketing. His powerful PopUpMaster Pro software creates popups that beat the popup blockers and can significantly increase your conversion rates. For more information: (http://www.popupmaster.com)

About the Author
Steve Shaw has been marketing full-time online since March 2002, developing software products and systems for effect'ive e-marketing - for more information see (http://takanomi.com).