Content is King…
It’s a common saying in the business world, but it’s true.
With all the changes Google has made in the last few years, the quality and length of the content you post online is more important than ever.
Even if you don’t depend on Google for traffic, the next best source of traffic (actually, it’s probably even more important than Google for most people) is viral traffic, and people don’t share crappy content. If you want to get traffic from social media without paying for it, you must be posting great content.
But creating killer content takes a lot of time and effort.
Or… it can take a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, there are actually ways to reduce the time it takes to create great content.
There are even ways to cut out the need to write content altogether, although you can’t get away with having no written content on your site unless it’s already an authority site or is getting a lot of traffic from social media. Google really needs to see some written content on a site.
In this article, you’re going to learn how what types of content you should be considering and resources to you can leverage to create content:
Alright, before we get started, we need to define what quality content actually is. You might think that quality content simply means being grammatically correct and having accurate information, but there are actually several different elements to creating quality content.
Let’s take a look at the elements of quality content:
- Interesting – Even the most useful content needs to be presented in an interesting way. Content that is boring isn’t going to be read to the end, nor is it going to encourage readers to view any of your other content.
- Entertaining – Not all content has to be extremely entertaining, but if it’s not useful, it should at least be funny or exciting.
- Useful – Unless your content is really interesting or entertaining in some way, it needs to be useful. Useful content like tutorials and educational material is quite popular both with readers and with search engines.
- Well Researched – Your content needs to be well researched, ideally from multiple sources.
- Factually Accurate – Obviously, your content must be factually accurate. If your site gets the reputation for distributing false information, people won’t come back.
- Grammatically Correct – Not only should your content be grammatically correct for readers, but also for search engines. Google can tell if your content is grammatically correct, so it’s more important than ever to ensure your spelling, grammar, and punctuation are all correct.
- Long – Unfortunately, these days, Google wants long content. This change basically came about to combat all those spammy websites that were putting up 150 to 300-word articles that were very basic and didn’t really offer anything of value other than repeating keywords often for search engine rankings. These days, Google likes to see articles that are at least 1,000 words, and up to 3,000. There’s one way to avoid writing long content, and that leads us to the last element of great content.
- Mixed Media – Having other media is not only great for your visitors, but Google loves it, too. You do need to have some written content on your site, but having other forms of media is great for Google, great for visitors, and great for you!
Resources
Here are links to some useful resources…
Freelance Marketplaces:
>> http://www.writeraccess.com
>> http://www.bloggingpro.com/jobs/
>> http://problogger.com/jobs/
Next Steps
If you are a solopreneur and would like a shortcut to creating great content then downloading our ‘Forager Bee’ Templates “3 Templates To Creating Content your Audience Craves Without Having To Write All Day, Every Day”, below is a good place to start:
