There are five categories of content that you can create on your website:
1. Blogs
2. Articles
3. Visitor-driven content (bulletin boards, community blogs, etc.)
4. Salesletters (for supporting content to sell a product)
5. Ads
I want to talk a bit about the first two here. These are the “mommy and daddy” of website content, so you must understand what these two types of content are about:
Blogs
Do you want traffic? Then you want a blog! Blogs are your best friend. They are easy to maintain, come in prepackaged software that is easy to install and customize, and best of all, they use the magic of RSS to drive traffic to your site.
RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. Most blog software is set up to use RSS automatically. The way this works is, every time you publish a new post to your blog, the RSS system will collect all the relevant data about the post and ‘ping’ the various blog indexing services out there. These services will provide automatic links around the Internet, and will also make links to your content available through newsreading software. Furthermore, the search engines automatically index your blog each time they pick up the ‘ping’ through the blog indexes.
This happens automatically! Just install the blog software, follow the defaults, and away you go! Your web host will usually provide some installed blog software for you already. The most popular blog software is usually WordPress, Live Journal, or B2Evolution.
Anything goes in a blog post. It’s kind of like a newspaper column or a journal. Blogs and niche focus go hand in hand. You can either handle your blog posting yourself (if you can send email, you can make a blog post!) or hire a professional blogger (cheapest work on the Internet!).
Remember than nobody expects you to be William Shakespeare when it comes to a blog – that’s what’s so great about it! A simple paragraph or two per post will suffice. You can share interesting links, talk about a news story relevant to your topic, publish a handy list of tips of interest to your niche focus, and so on. The easiest content publishing known to man.
Articles
Articles should typically be 500 to 800 words in length and be natural writing on the topic which visitors will actually read. As with blog posts, as long as the key focus is mentioned somewhere in the content a couple of times, that’s enough for a relevant search hit. As opposed to a blog post, an article is a stable, static web page all in itself. Similar to a blog, you will want ads along the side or at the top. You should have a group of articles with an index page linking to all of them – about 20 articles on a topic will be enough to get the search engines to index you for that topic.
With articles, web surfers will expect a slightly more formal tone than with a blog. So, if you have some knowledge of the topic, you can write these yourself. Or you can hire a professional freelance writer. Finally, you can visit any one of several free article submission sites out there.