Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

This past weekend, we had our first post-200 visit day on Saturday since we started actively posting and promoting this blog at the beginning of March. Our growth has been almost completely free of cost, as we’ve been focusing on guerrilla tactics for traffic building; we’ve been able to have a fairly high retention rate of the people that stumble onto this blog, and our loyal reader base is growing. The main reason for this is the useful content we post. We have posted some traffic building tips, and we will post even more in the future. However, if the content on your website or blog sucks, you’re just going to be grinding your gears and making no progress.

They say content is king, and it’s true. A nice design is important, and your site needs to function and be usable, but while all those other facets of a website are important, if your content is sub-par, it will be nearly impossible for your site to live up to its potential. Here are some tips to help you get killer content.

1. Topic

If you’ve invested thousands of dollars and years of effort and still haven’t made a dime on the Internet, then you probably shouldn’t be writing about making money online. The subject of your blog or website should be something that you are passionate about, so that you are excited and fired up to build the content. However, passion is not enough: you need to be knowledgeable too. Ever since John Chow hit the A-List, starting a make-money-online blog is all the rage. Honestly, when we started this blog back in December, our original inspiration to get into blogging was John’s site. However, there are a large number of topics out there that people are interested in besides making money online.

I think a lot of people are missing the boat right now, because they should be writing about something they know about rather than copying another blogger who’s had success in a topic they don’t know very much about. If you have chosen a topic that you aren’t qualified to write for, you can always hire someone to write the blog posts for you. This has the added benefit of freeing you up for doing the promotion of the blog exclusively. The obvious downside is the cost.

I recently started a personal project blog on the subject of Ancient History. I know very little about it, so I hired someone who does and the content has met mostly glowing reviews from people.

1 (a). Quality of content.

Your content has to be passionate and knowledgeable, but it has to be understandable too! Jay and I have spelling and grammar issues, so we have a proof reader that fixes the myriad of spelling and grammar errors before the posts make it live. I am especially bad when I write posts late at night. Occasionally the proof reader misses a post and it gets posted live before it’s been proofed [editor’s note: I wonder how that happens…? ;) ]. I’m sure you can tell when that happens!

2. Frequency of content

You should be constantly adding new content to your site no matter the market. This is another one of those universal principles that applies to every type of site. If you’re a blogger, aim for 1+ posts per day; if you run a free web templates site, you should be adding new templates every week. People need to view your website as being refreshed with new content all the time. Otherwise they won’t come back. Why would they, if they’ve seen it all before?

3. Market saturation

When starting a new site, you should take a really close look at the topic / market you plan to enter. Look seriously at how many successful sites there are currently in your field, and how big the market is - these two factors directly determine how difficult it will be to make your site popular. The more successful the sites and the smaller the market, the more you should think twice about your decision before going through it. There’s nothing wrong with entering a saturated market, but you have to have a plan to get the market share away from the established providers in that market. This is really just business theory, but the principle transposes to online business.

4. Perseverance

Rome was not built in a day: ie. 99% of the time you won’t be an overnight success. It does happen, but most of the time it takes weeks or months for a site to start growing, and sometimes it can be a slow process. Don’t give up! If you take note of the above points (especially the one about quality content), and you keep at it without giving up, you will be successful. Be patient and don’t give up.

Good Profits!