Congratulations! You have selected a cheap affordable web hosting company, a solid domain name, and have got your web site online. Now what do you fill it with? Useless drivel on a website can be the biggest turn off from a visitor and cost you hits (especially repeat hits) as well as search engine ranking. If you are staring at a blinking cursor and scratching your head, here are some tips to get you through the rough times of creating online content:
- If someone asked you about your opinion on your company, beliefs, or whatever your site may be marketing, how would you answer them? Organize your thoughts in an outline like:
A. Overview of my topic
1. Basis for my thought
2. My credentialsB. Details of my topic
This will help you get started without worrying about explanatory wording and sentence structure. Outlining what you want to say will also keep you from being scattered and all over the place, keeping you and your reader focused on your main point.
- Are you trying to optimize your site for search engines? If so, make sure your content makes many relevant references to your keywords. Do not just throw them in there at random every now and then! Make sure they are relevant to the sentence and fit smoothly.
- Utilize your resources. Spell check and grammar check your content before posting it to your website. I know from personal experience that when I visit a site rich in spelling and grammatical errors, I do not even want to stay! If you start sounding redundant, try checking a thesaurus for a synonym.
- Contact your cheap and affordable web hosting company for advice or references. They may have a content development company that they have worked with in the past that they feel comfortable referring you to. Even if you do not want someone to actually write your content, it is very helpful to have a second set of eyes review your content for errors and continuity.
- Seek help from a professional content writer. If your cheap affordable web hosting company does not have a content company they work with, you can always seek the help of a third party through a free land site such as Rentacoder.com and Odesk.com. When you place a bid on one of these sites, you can seek out an expert to write all the content for you or merely read and edit the content you have already written.
- Read! Look at other websites, especially if they relate to your subject of choice and get ideas from their content. This does not mean copy their content, but jot down little notes or points of interest that you can talk about in your content.
- Do Not Copy! Not only in plagiarism unethical and constitutes copyright infringement in some circumstances, but it can dramatically hurt your search engine rankings. Posting duplicate content makes the search engine ignore your updates because it is a repeat of a site that is already ranked higher. In addition, your cheap affordable web hosting company might have policies that you agreed to within your terms of service that said you would not host illegally attained or copied content on their servers. There are grave consequences to plagiarism, so think about it before you hit that copy button.
- Stay current. No one wants to read content that is outdated as Internet Explorer 5 and the Bill Clinton scandal! No one cares anymore. Make sure your content is relevant to current times. Very few topics are absolutely timeless so posting outdated material will turn your visitors away and make your site look very old and static.
- Keep it simple. Often times, experts in a field will talk about their passion but become overly technical or write in a way that only a fellow expert would understand. Think about the audience you want and use wording that is appropriate to convey thoughts to them. For example, if you are talking about web hosting, you might want to say “hosting control panel” when referencing Plesk or Ensim. Yes, these are industry standard tools, but common users will not know that unless you educate them properly.
Again, remember to contact your cheap web hosting company before going with a content editing or content writing vendor. Your budget web host may even offer discounts with certain vendors that you would not be able to find on your own.
