nick usborne's blog

What you have been missing on Web Content Cafe...

Everyone get’s free access to the articles I publish each week at Web Content Cafe.

But unless you are a member, you don’t get to read the daily posts.

Here’s just some of what you have been missing lately:

- 7 different headline approaches for your content pages

- Using Wikipedia to find interesting sub-topics

- A free and feature-filled widget to help you collect feedback from your readers

- Searching different country domains for new topic ideas

And coming up this week:

- An excellent video on how to become a content curator, and use that position to find new content and extend your influence

- An interesting statistic on how expressing your personal or company values helps engage readers and increase sales.

And more...

If you have been reading about Google’s Farmer update, you know how critical it is to generate quality content that is both useful and engaging.

This is the focus of the Web Content Cafe daily posts – to give you the ideas, tools and inspiration you need to come up with quality content for your own website.

Learn more about Web Content Cafe membership...

 

 

Content, frequency - and my big, fat long tail.

Content is the foundation, and the heart of just about every monetization model online.

Without a growing body of web content, you’ll fail to compete.

Yes, quality matters. But frequency matters too.

Here are the two reasons why frequency matters.

First, frequency drives volume.

The more often you add new content to your website, the faster you’ll build a significant volume of pages. And the more pages you create, the more entry pages you’ll have for the search engines to find.

As an example, on one of my sites I have recently lost page one positions for two of my most important keywords. But the overall volume of visitors to my site is growing, and those visitor numbers are way higher than those achieved by the sites which now hold top positions for those “top keywords”.

I beat them because of volume. I have a big, fat long tail.

My numbers are down for those pages which I optimized for those top keywords, but I more than make up for the loss with traffic to over a thousand long-tail pages.

Frequency also drives attention and engagement.

You can have thousands of pages on your site, but if you haven’t added new content recently, you are giving both the search engines and potential visitors little reason to visit you.

Google likes fresh content. Social media likes fresh content. People like fresh content.

One way or another, the success of your site or sites in 2011 will be driven by the frequency with which you publish new content.

Frequency gives you the volume of content your need to compete. Frequency gives you the freshness you need to attract attention.

And if you ever find yourself falling short of enough new ideas to keep your content hopper full, sign up for Web Content Cafe.

Web Content Cafe is fast becoming the primary source online for new web content ideas.

Some days I write about a topic idea that is seasonal, another day I might write about a new tool I'm using to identify hot or trending topics.

I write about how to write great content, how to mix up different types of content, content that works best with the search engines, content that works well with social media...and a whole lot more.

Whatever the daily topics, subscribers get access to five new web content ideas each week.

And if they act on just one of those five ideas, they will more than pay for the modest monthly subscription fee of $14.95.

In short, Web Content Cafe membership helps deliver frequency.

Learn more about Web Content Cafe membership...

 

 

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.

How social media engagement makes you improve your website, fast.

I wrote a guest post for the SiteSell Blog last week (Thanks for the invitation to contribute!). Here is a short excerpt from what I wrote:

“When I created the Facebook page, I realized I would have to start working on the page, and on my site, every day. If you want to do well with social media, you have to remain engaged daily.

The result? Traffic to my site has significantly increased over the last few months. A small part of that can be attributed to traffic coming in directly from my Facebook page. I imagine there have been some SEO benefits too.

But I believe most of that new traffic is arriving because I am doing a lot more with the site itself. I am adding a lot of new pages, updating old pages, and generally being more active with the site.

In other words, social media is working well for my site primarily because it is forcing me to work harder on the site itself.

There are plenty of good reasons to get involved with social media, but for me, this has been the most beneficial of them all.”

(Read the full post, and the comments it attracted.)

I find it interesting that it took a commitment to engage through social media to force me to pay closer attention to my main website.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

I think thousands of companies are getting into social media, and at the same time realising that they need to start adding a lot more new content to their sites as a result.

Which, of course, brings us to Web Content Cafe – your source for new web content ideas, with a fresh content idea being posted daily, five days a week.

Learn more about Web Content Cafe membership here...

 

 

Why I turned down a $100k+ offer for my coffee website...

"How to Write Your Own Money Making Websites" is by far the most popular of all my programs.

And I can understand why. The passive income I make with my own “hobby sites”, like CoffeeDetective.com, is the income I like best. It comes in each month, rain or shine, and even while I am on vacation.

If you write for a living and don’t yet have one of more of these money-making websites, I encourage you to get started.

If you choose a topic that interests you – and in my case, that’s coffee – then working on the site is more of a hobby than work.

Plus...given some time and work, that hobby site can start generating a significant income. It’s a separate stream of income, and it can really make a difference.

For instance, the income from my coffee site pays my mortgage, my utilities, my car payments, my groceries...and more. It actually earns me a sum in excess of the average family income here in North America.

Plus, I have created an asset. A few months ago I was offered a cash payment for the site in excess of $100,000.

Not bad for a hobby.

I didn’t accept it, because I know my site can earn me a lot more than that over the next few years.

Sound like the kind of “hobby asset’ you would like to have?

If you get your own copy of How to Write Your Own Money Making Websites before October 29th, you’ll save $100.

Plus you’ll get immediate access not only to the full program, but also to the recordings of an 8-week webinar training program.

Learn more about How to Write Your Own Money Making Websites here...

 

 

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...

 

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...

New coaching service: 40-minute calls to help you with your website.

The core of my coaching services focuses on helping my clients build a solid and profitable freelance business. For these clients I offer one-month or three-month coaching options.

But recently, more and more people have been asking if they can pay for just a single call about creating and writing their websites.

The website could be for your freelance business, or it could be a money-making website on a topic that interests you.

Either way, if you need help in deciding on how best to structure your site, craft your main messages, write your body text, or promote you site, you can now schedule a single 40-minute call with me.

Do I know what I’m talking about when it comes to creating and writing websites? I think so. As well as helping my individual coaching clients, I have been hired to do exactly this kind of work by companies including Yahoo!, Disney, the J. Paul Getty Trust, John Deere, Novartis and many others.

The price is just $200 for the call, with a couple of follow-up emails included.

If you would like some help with your website, but don’t need a month or three months of coaching, this could be perfect for you.

If you would like to schedule a call, email me at nickusborne@gmail.com, and include the phrase “website coaching” in the subject line.

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...