Great content is king
Most people have heard the phrase “content is king”. What this means is that no matter what else you do to try to improve your website or blog (for example, spend time tweaking your design, working on search engine optimization techniques, or installing new features), it’s ultimately the content that you post on your site that is the major magnet that attracts visitors to your site.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? No one is going to bother coming to your site to see your great design (OK, they might come once). No one is going to come because you’ve got a great ads. People come for the content. Don’t believe me? Take a look at your surfing habits. How much of your surfing is content-driven? My guess would be that most of it is.
But I think that the phrase “content is king” is far too simplistic. More specifically, I think that the phrase should be “great content is king”. People will come your your site and revisit more often because of your great content. The longer they hang about, the more chance there is that they will see and click on your ads. Think about it. Where do people who visit your website or blog come from? Chances are, they come from a search result page after doing a web search (most probably, using Google). What makes them come to your site? Content! However, not only does your content have to be compelling enough to draw users to your site, it has to be good enough to jump up in the listings and get into the first page or so of those search results in order to be seen and clicked on. Great, well written, original content can do this.
But what about reusing content? Many “AdSense gurus” suggest that you find sites that allow you to use their content on your website and advocate this as a way to populate your website or blog with good content.
Garbage! This is a total load! These sites that offer content for redistribution are doing so because this is their business model. They want their content on your site because you have to link back to them and they hope that your visitors will go from your site to their site and see and click on their ads. It works for them, but it won’t work for you. If you have a blog or website and you are planning to make money from reusing content, forget about it. Save the money that you’d spend on hosting and go go something else. It’s a total waste of time. Remember, you’re playing against millions of existing blogs, with thousands being created daily. Do you really think that you’re going to win against these odds with duplicated content?
There are always going to be a few people who will tell you that this is a good idea, but this is because their business model revolves around fooling people into thinking that it’s possible to make mega bucks with no effort.
Making money is all about adding value. You do something which adds value and you’re rewarded. It’s simple. Posting content that someone else has written doesn’t add any value to your site. Think about it. What is compelling about duplicated content? What about this is going to draw visitors to your site? Why don’t they go to the site where the article appeared originally? How is it going to improve the ranking of your site? It just doesn’t make sense! It’s nothing more than a scam – either someone is trying to scam you into linking to them, or they are trying to scam you that it’s easy to make money online. Pure garbage!
If you want to make money on the Internet, you MUST find a mechanism that adds value. Reproducing content that you can find elsewhere on the net isn’t adding value. You must, if your venture is to succeed, either write great, compelling, original content yourself, or pay someone else to do it. Period. There are no shortcuts. You MUST add value.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t link to other content or quote something, but for each and every post that you make, you need to ask yourself “what’s the value that I’ve added here?”. Sometimes that might be just that you’ve highlighted an article or post that otherwise might not get much attention. It might be bringing together a number of reviews for a particular product. Again, this adds value. Look for the value you are adding – the money you make will be directly proportional to the amount of value you add. As a web entrepreneur, this is an area that you should spending a lot of your time concentrating on. There are no shortcuts. If anyone tells you otherwise, it’s bull.
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