For our purposes we will consider two types of content - product/service (i.e. when you are selling a product or service directly to your website visitors) AND information whereby you are attracting visitors by offering them valuable information and consequently selling the traffic from visitors on your website to advertisers who will in their turn try to sell something to your visitors.

In the first case you are offering something of value to your visitors (product/service) in exchange for payment. In the second case, you are offering something of value to your visitors for free (information), but then sell the traffic your visitors generate to advertisers who want to sell something to your visitors.

We will mostly concentrate on creating an informational website that attracts visitors by providing valuable information to them. Relative traffic composed of visitors who are interested in information you provide in its turn represents a product/service that you would be selling to your advertising customers - exposure to their target audience.

Selling a product/service requires setting up an internet shop, which usually means higher level of expertise and set up costs. Setting up an informational website is all about building up good content that will represent interest to visitors and advertisers.

Things to keep in mind when selecting content

When building up content, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, it should be something you really do know about and preferably something you are passionate about and/or are really good at. Otherwise it will be another useless redundant article on the net, which are already present in abundance. Those too can generate some random income but I personally like the feeling of getting paid for something useful I did. The idea is to really create something of value to your visitors. Writing about topics which represent real interest to you proves to be more efficient, effective and you have more fun time doing it.

Building the content

There is different content you can provide on your website would represent value to your visitors. Here you will find some basics on creation of different variations of content. One thing to keep in mind with all of them is copyright considerations. Stealing content besides being immoral is also illegal, so I would suggest creating your own content and when/if using complimentary content from elsewhere always obtain a prior permission from the author. Many times the authors will be happy to assist, sometimes asking for a link to their source where you found the content.

Text content

Internet is still often believed to be all around text content. It may still be so, but other content types should not be underestimated.

Images as website content

Quite a bit of search is performed on images. However you should understand that search engines do not see a picture as a human visitor does. This means, if you are not providing some information for the search engine, the visitor who might be interested in your images might also not find it.

If you are a photographer, create a gallery, but don't forget to include some text and description, to give a little more bone to chew on to the search engines.

Video and other media

Videos and other media content is becoming quite popular. Popular in the sense that today's technology is there to support this content and people are actively searching for it.

The trick with media content is that search engines (on which we rely on for most of our traffic) have hard time understanding what media content is about. Sure, search engines are becoming more advanced but a search engine still can't watch a video like a human and categorize it as being related to one theme or another. So, if you are bulding your website mostly around media content, make sure you give enough textual content for search engines (and your visitors) that depicts the content.

Building a Dynamic Website

A dynamic website is principally different from a regular (static) website. Dynamic website content is changing with time and with user interaction. Dynamic content offers two significant advantages.

First of all, an interactive and ever-changing website is more interesting to a visitor than static content so it keeps users coming back.

Second, certain types of dynamic sites (forums, social networks, advertising sites, etc.) create content themselves, which creates more content pages for you, the webmaster, which creates more traffic and more income. If you didn't understand what 'building content by themselves' mean, I'll give you a very illustrative example.

One of my websites is an automotive network. I had spent ten if not hundreds of hours promoting the site. The promotional efforts were paying off and I was getting a few thousand of hits on each page, but I was basically promoting about ten pages of my website. Then, I came to realize that posts that my visitors were leaving on my website are content in itself, so I got made my forum visible for search engines (read more about structuring your website). In the forum I had about 5 000 pages. Even when each of them was getting only a couple of hits my traffic nearly trippled.

Just in case you didn't understand any of the above (and it is possible, since I do sometimes get carried away and become too technical in my discussions) just understand this - the more content pages the better and dynamic websites produce more content.

creating web cotent

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