Get from Point A to Point B, quickly and with the least effort.
Your Point A is that you are a small business owner and webmaster. Your Point B is that you need content on your website. Get from Point A to Point B faster by creating content using what you already have. Whether you manage an ecommerce website or large informational site or anything in between doesn’t matter. In order to keep yourself in the game, ranking well in the search engines and getting a healthy amount of traffic coming to your site requires that you all play by pretty much the same rules.
What do the engines want?
The engines do have preferences, and your job is to give it to them. They want freshness. Serve the engines new content to see each time they come your way. They want quality. No keyword stuffing, no spammy content, no content written by word generators. Just real, useful content that is of the highest quality you can provide. They want quantity. It’s not fair but the more pages you have that an engine can index the more they like you. They want links. Links means other sites trust you and want to share with other sites what you have to say. Linkbait content such as videos, podcasts, white papers, newsletters and other content that is useful to people and easily shared provides incentive for people to link to you.
Marketing guru John Jantsch has written a post called “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose,” a slogan which he’s borrowing from the green movement and applying to the notion of using content you already have to create more online content on your web pages. The post is from February 20, and I’m just reading it today (I’m behind on my blog reading…tell me you’re not?), but this advice never goes out of style. As I was reading it my thought process went something like this: a) Dang, I wish I wrote this post! b) Gee, our readers would find this really useful. c) Heeey, this matches up with advice I had given in recent posts about adding multimedia or other video content. d) I’ll keep the ‘reuse’ theme going by ‘using’ John’s post myself!
So here you go. I highly recommend clicking through to John’s original post, but here’s a tidbit of his advice.
- If you get the same questions over and over again, answer them all in an audio format.
- Take those same questions and turn them into blog posts.
Speaking at an industry event? Record all of your slide presentations and upload them to sites like YouTube and Slideshare.
Check out John’s “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose” post for more easy ways you can utilize content you already have.
