Article - Website Imperatives and Solutions

Website Imperatives and Solutions
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

When you take a look at the most visited sites on the
internet, what hits you in the face? Change, growth, new
content. In a sense, a search engine is the perfect web
site. By it's very nature, it grows and changes
continuously and moment by moment adds new content. But,
most of us are never going to build a Yahoo or a Google.
The competition at that level is horrific.

But the lesson is there to be read. You could build a
great site with terrific content never seen before and do
very well - for a while. But the imperatives that control
our success or failure revolve around growth, change and
new content. An obvious solution is to continually provide
new content for your sites. Basically this means writing
or constructing new pages, preferably with unique content.

There are, certainly, several easy ways to get content for
your site. The first is to use other people's articles.
Nearly all of us who do write and publish articles want
people to pick them up and use them - with live links to
our sites, naturally. Despite a lot of mindless babble
about a duplicate content penalty, article syndication is
alive and working as well as ever. Just don't scrape a
site and replicate it.

Another source is RSS. Most feeds are meant to be
syndicated (but not all so you do need to check Terms of
Use) and they provide updated content. Other sources
include content in the in the public domain.

Like all easy solutions, there are a couple of drawbacks.
Other people's articles may not be focused as well as you'd
like to your site content and goals. And they don't help
your site's link popularity. Along with growth, change and
content, incoming links are a critical success factor.

Using RSS feeds or other search-based content can raise
copyright issues, irritate some feed or site owners, and
may be even more poorly focused to your site's content than
articles. If you use RSS feeds, almost inevitably you'll
see content on your site that is absolutely irrelevant.

Public domain materials are extremely useful as content
sources - if you can find matches to your site content.
Assuming that you can, then you will need to convert the
material into pages or into a form useable on your web
pages. This can be time-consuming, but it may be easier
than writing your own content.

Ghost writers are yet another alternative. Here you trade
time for money. But this can be a tricky process. Some
are not really fluent in English and you may need to do
some rewriting. Also, you may need to double-check and
make sure that the articles provided are actually original
and not nearly identical to existing copyrighted material.
Some ghost writers seem to work by finding a site with a
related theme and then pretty much copy material from that
site with minimal changes. Not a good idea for you to post
that as your own.

Another source would be sites offering private label
products. Many of those products can be mined for
excellent targeted site content. Some products sold with
Master resale rights also allow you to use the materials as
site content. In this last case, you need to be certain
exactly what you can and can't do under the specific rights
package. Sometimes you can alter the materials, sometimes
you can't.

Private label products with you having full rights,
including the right to alter them and put your own name on
them as author can be one of the easiest ways to meet all
of the imperatives. With rights to an informative, new and
interesting book on a niche topic, you can rework it a
little, maybe add some nice graphics, generate a PDF and
sell it.

Or you could generate that PDF and also generate pages for
your site from the book. Give the PDF away in exchange for
signing up to your list. Extract tips and ideas from the
book and put together 2 or 5 or more articles based on the
book. Publish and distribute the articles to generate
links to your site and help brand yourself as an expert.

From one private label product you can generate a lot of
new real estate for your site, add a viral product that you
can use to build your lists, and through articles generate
incoming links and do some useful branding.

It really doesn't get any easier than that. It takes some
time and effort, but nothing like the effort of writing 5
or 10 articles from scratch, building 30 or 50 or 150 web
pages, and writing your own viral book for list-building.

What about the other people who belong to the same private
label site? Isn't everybody going to have duplicate
content? In the real world, 90 percent of the people with
access to a product will do nothing at all or the absolute
minimum. Very few will mine the product, produce articles,
produce web pages, or produce a nicely modified PDF. And
of those that do, each will follow their own unique path.
The chance of near identical content is pretty low. The
PDFs produced may be more similar, but consider how many
people make serious money with resale rights selling
identical material.

There's a lot of room out there. Even within the most
competitive niches, a thoughtful, patient marketer who pays
attention to the imperatives and works smart, can make a
living few would complain about. But there are also less
competitive niches where the same marketer could become the
dominant force. The materials are out there to get you
going. Use them and work smart.

None of this is rocket science. The first, and ultimate,
imperative is take action. Too many will fail, because they
never even really began. Start today.

Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business
and professional presentations and eCommerce related
matters. For more information on eCommerce sites and
eCommerce site building -
http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com - and
http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com/articles
for more eCommerce articles.

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