nick usborne's blog

Take the 30-day cure for thin and disappointing content.

For any site that depends of Google for a significant part of its traffic, the days of easy content are over.

Last year’s Mayday update and this year’s Panda update have driven the final nails into the coffin of quick, cheap content.

If you want Google to show your pages on page one of the search results, you need to create content that is truly useful.

In addition, as Google and the other major search engines increasingly factor in social signals as part of their listings algorithms, you need to make your web content shareable.

In other words, if your content isn’t good enough to make people want to share it through social media, you’ll be at a real disadvantage.

So...what is the 30-day cure?

Simply sign up for Web Content Cafe membership, and spend the first 30 days going through our archive of almost 250 content ideas.

Then use those ideas to increase both the volume and quality of the content on your site.

After the first 30 days you can decide whether to continue your monthly membership, or cancel.

Either way, access to those 250 ideas will be well worth your first month’s subscription.

Learn more and sign up for Web Content Cafe membership...

 

Reasons to write a lot more long-tail content...

As you undoubtedly know, the term “long-tail content” describes those pages on your website which are optimized for keywords that don’t get searched for a lot - but for which there is even less competition.

In other words, even though a long-tail content page may not bring in a ton of visitors, it’s relatively easy to get it showing on page one of the Google search results.

The key here is to publish a LOT of pages optimized for long-tail keywords.

Here are some interesting figures from a post I found at the Junta42 blog.

- 18% of search traffic arrives through the fat head

- 11.5% of search traffic arrives through the chunky middle

- 70% of search traffic arrives through the long tail

Put simply, if your website doesn’t have a long tail, you are missing out on that 70%.

On top of that, long tail traffic almost always converts better.

Here are a couple more interesting tidbits from that post:

- The fastest growing type of keyword search is a length of eight words.

- The type of search that converts at the highest rate is the four-word search.

What’s the takeaway here?

The takeaway is that you need to be creating a lot more long-tail content, to maximize that 70%.

And if you’re not sure where you’re going to find enough ideas for all those new pages...

You guessed right...it’s time to sign up as a member at Web Content Cafe.

At Web Content Cafe I publish a new content idea or insight every day, five days a week.

Learn more about Web Content Cafe...

 

How much is a good page of web content worth?

Good question.

How much is it worth to you or your business if a page attracts 100, 500 or 1,000 organic search engine visitors each day, every day?

What is the longer-term cash value of a page that drives a ton of social media activity?

How about a page that hits the sweet spot with Google AdSense?

Or a page that converts readers to buyers through affiliate links?

Or a page that is written to drive sales of your own products or services?

Sometimes we get so involved in the day-to-day process of writing new content pages, we lose sight of their potential value, particularly over the long term.

Put simply, we should pay a lot more attention to each page, and write it with a view to its ultimate potential as a source of direct or indirect income.

Above all, we need to create quality content.

This is why I created Web Content cafe.

As a member you get immediate access to the 120 content ideas already in the archive, with new posts being added 5 days a week.

The cost for access to all those ideas is just $14.95 a month, and you can cancel at any time.

Which brings us back to the income potential of just one new web page.

If Web Content Cafe membership led to the creation of just one new revenue-generating page a month, that would more than pay for your subscription.

If you wrote ten, or added a new page every day...the sky’s the limit.

Learn more about Web Content Cafe membership...

 

You know you’re doing something right when you are targeted by spammers.

A little while ago I received a comment on one of my Web Content Cafe articles. The author warned me to remove the offending article...or else.

Naturally, I ignored the comment and binned it.

A day later I started to receive a flood of spam comments, all directed to that one article.

Sure, it’s a pain to have to send all those comments to the spam bin, but perhaps it’s also a badge of honor.

After all, anything that upsets spammers has to be a good thing.

The offending article?

Why adding a ton of new articles to your website is usually a bad idea.

 

 

What kinds of web content ideas do I share?

People sometimes ask me what kinds of content ideas I publish within the membership area at Web Content Café.

Good question, as you can't actually browse the archive and see the ideas until you take the plunge and sign up.

I try to mix it up a bit. Here are some examples of what you’ll find in the archive:

- How to create slideshows which engage readers and attract more traffic.

- Different ways to conduct and publish interviews with topic experts.

- Tools you can use to present information in the form of infographics, charts or mind maps.

- How to anticipate topic trends, and publish relevant content at the right time.

- Tips to make content pages more likely to be distributed through social media.

- Tracking tools to show you who is talking about your topic today, and what they are saying.

- How to add a comments function to a static web page.

- Headline ideas that attract more readers.

- Ways to create new pages fast by re-purposing existing information.

The list goes on and on. There are so many ways to create better content, more engaging content, and content that more readers want to share.

In short, there is no excuse for just writing more and more short articles, reviews or product and service descriptions.

There is a huge variety of content approaches you can take. And your readers will thank you for mixing it up and making your site more interesting.

As for signing up, there's no risk. if you don't find value in what you see, just cancel your membership.

Learn more about Web Content Café...

 

 

Get immediate access to 79 social media friendly content ideas for your websites.

Just another information page, product page or service page isn’t likely to do you much good when it comes to getting shared through social media sites.

To get exposure through social media, you need to write and do something different.

You need to write or create something sharable.

That’s what these 79 web content ideas are far.

When you sign up for Web Content Café membership, you get immediate access to the 79 web content ideas already in the archive.

Then you can log in to view a new idea every day, five days a week.

This is what drives any social media strategy – something new, something different, something worth sharing.

Who subscribes to Web Content Café?

- Website managers working to inspire in-house writers, add value to their websites and engage more prospects and customers.

- Freelancers wanting to add value to their relationships with their clients, and build their expertise as web content writers.

- Writers of their own money-making websites, looking for content ideas that will attract more search engines traffic, get more social media exposure, engage more readers, and generate more income.

Learn more about the benefits of Web Content Café membership...

Inspire your web writers to write content that engages your readers more deeply.

Web content is becoming depressingly grey.

How come? It’s about money.

Everyone and their aunt has discovered that if you create short, optimized pages in bulk, you can make out like a bandit with advertising revenues.

Weekend entrepreneurs do it. Even Yahoo! does it.

The outcome is that tens of thousands of short, highly-optimized and low-quality pages are uploaded to the web each day.

Low quality? Absolutely. When you buy in bulk, you buy cheap. When you buy cheap, you get low quality.

However...

If your business is not based on making a killing in advertising revenue, you need to get out of the grey content game.

You need high-quality content that engages your readers and makes them want to come back for more.

You need to create content worth sharing, so it is spread far and wide through social media.

You need to create content that generates leads, subscriptions or sales.

How can you inspire your content writers to create more compelling content?

Get them an annual subscription to Web Content Café.

In addition to dozens of articles on web content best practices, they will also get immediate access to a library of 75 web content ideas.

And from today forward, they can log in to read a new web content idea every day, five days a week.

Learn more about the benefits of Web Content Café membership...

 

 

Zagging is fun.

You know the old marketing saw – while everyone is zigging, it’s time to zag.

That’s not what I planned with Web Content Café, but it seems to be what’s happening.

Everywhere I look I see people extolling the virtues of article marketing. Nothing wrong with that...unless you cut corners and publish cheap articles in the hope of fooling the search engines.

Even giant sites like Yahoo! and AOL are getting into that game big time. They have authority domains and plan to monetize staggering quantities of backfill content at lower levels on their sites.

Meanwhile, the get-rich-quick crowd are rushing to persuade people to outsource their article-writing to the Philippines, or use article scraping software to create even more content.

That’s what’s zigging right now. And it’s a huge industry. Content mills like DemandMedia.com and AssociatedContent.com are growing like topsy. (AssociatedContent.com is now owned by Yahoo!)

So when I promote the value of quality content, putting readers ahead of the search engines, I suddenly find myself zagging.

I think I like that. And it’s not like I’m zagging as part of a cunning marketing plan. My position on quality content is the real me. It is what I have been saying since I started out on the web back in 1995. It’s what I wrote about in my book, Net Words, in 2001.

It’s fun to take a contrary position when you believe in it.

And when you know you are right. : )

More about Web Content Café...

 

 

Your readers are probably getting bored with a constant, relentless diet of articles.

Sure, articles are fast to write, and easy to optimize. But too much of the same old thing just gets boring.

And why subject your readers to more and more articles? There are a ton of ways to offer your visitors more value.

Here are just a few alternatives to articles:

- Interviews

- Slideshows

- Tutorials

- Infographics

- Reviews

- Scoops

- Q&A

The list goes on and on.

Delivering greater value to your readers, through quality content, is what Web Content Café is all about.

In fact, there are 59 web content ideas already listed in the archive at the Web Content Café site right now. And a new content idea is added every day, five days a week.

Plus there are dozens of free and premium articles on the site too.

Who subscribes to Web Content Café?

- Website managers working to inspire in-house writers, add value to their websites and engage more prospects and customers.

- Freelancers wanting to add value to their relationships with their clients, and build their expertise as web content writers.

- Writers of their own money-making websites, looking for content ideas that will attract more search engines traffic, get more social media exposure, engage more readers, and generate more income.

To get instant access to the all 59 web content ideas already on the site, sign up now...

5 Ways in which low-quality web content can damage your business.

Some marketers find the allure of bulk, low-quality content irresistible.  Each page is cheap, and each has the potential to attract search engine traffic. Publish a hundred, a thousand or a hundred thousand of these pages and you can attract a lot of extra visitors to your site.

But...low-quality content can do more damage than good. Read the slideshow for 5 reasons why...

Learn more about the benefits of Web Content Café membership…