nick usborne's blog

Do freelancers need to add a large number of content pages to their sites?

Good question.

It all depends on how you are planning to attract new clients.

If you find new clients through phone calls, direct mail or some other direct sales medium, then you don’t need a huge number of pages on your freelance website. The site is there as a brochure, to reassure your hot prospects.

But if your client acquisition strategy includes having prospects find your site through the search engines, or through social media, then yes, you need a ton of content on your website.

Why? 

Because tens of thousands of freelancers are optimizing their websites for phrases like “freelance copywriter” or “online copywriting”.

But there are only ten available spots on the first page of Google’s search results.

And you are not going to get on page one if your site has only ten pages, however well you optimize them.

If you want to attract prospective clients to your site through the search engines, you’ll be working to the same rules followed by every content-based website – he or she who publishes the highest number of quality pages wins. (Ho-hum pages won’t cut it, because to win with the search engines, you also need plenty of inbound links from quality, related sites. And other sites will only link to quality content.)

If you want significant search engine traffic coming to your website, you need to have dozens, and then hundreds of pages.

Some can be blog posts, articles, case studies, tips, and guides.

Others can be multimedia – video, slide shows, infographics, and so on.

Each page or post should, of course, be optimized for one particular keyword or phrase. Or be optimized for social media.

For many freelancers, this will means an upgrade to their site, and many more hours devoted to content creation.

If you feel you might fall short of having enough ideas for your site content, sign up for Web Content Cafe membership – where I publish a new web content idea daily, five days a week.

 

 

Getting close to $10k with my coffee site this month...

As you may know, in my spare time I have a website about making coffee. For the last few years I have been consistently adding new content to the site.

Well, this month, it looks like my income from that site – CoffeeDetective.com – could break the $10k barrier.

Not bad for a hobby site. Granted, December is the strongest month of the year for affiliate and AdSense income, as people buy coffee makers and grinders as gifts. But even so.

As you can imagine, the revenue from that site is my favorite kind of income.

It’s passive, comes in every month, and I make it doing something I enjoy.

I’m my own boss too. No clients. No deadlines. I just work on the site as and when I can, and when I feel like it.

If you like the idea of having that kind of income stream for yourself – but don’t know how to do it – you need a copy of my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

Get it now, and you’ll have time to go through it once before my next series of 7 live training webinars starts on January 17th. No extra charge for the live webinar training, or the member forum site.

Get my program before December 15th, and you’ll also save $100 on the price.

In other words, get it now. ; )

More about How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites...

 

 

Quality web content is becoming more and more important. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

Interesting article at eMarketer.com this morning – 2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical.

As I have been saying for a while, the rise of social media is creating pressure for companies to create more and more quality content.

Here is the eMarketer chart.




As you can see, companies which are engaged in social media are using a variety of content types as fuel for their social media campaigns.

Take note of the fact that the #1 position is “branded” content. Not scraped content, not content-mill content.

And the #2 position is Expert Content.

In other words, companies realize that the social media environment demands quality. Without quality, nothing is shared, and your company’s reputation is damaged.

Garbage content may do the trick, for now at least, when attracting traffic from the search engines. But it won’t cut it with social media.

I also really like the questions they asked later in the under the chart:

Marketers should ask themselves five questions about the magnetic content they are seeking to create to determine whether it will be truly attractive to their audience:

1. Is the content unique?
2. Is the content useful?
3. Is the content well executed?
4. Is the content fun?
5. Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?

I agree, absolutely.

If you want to create magnetic content to feed your own social media campaigns, and are sometimes stumped for ideas, learn more about my site, Web Content Café.

Web Content Café’s core purpose is to deliver ideas to help you create quality content in a variety of forms, with particular emphasis on content that gets shared through social media.