Introduction to the Importance of Content Development
Here’s a secret that very successful bloggers know:
Even if you screw everything else up, great content has wings! Even if you don’t set your blog up properly. If you do everything else wrong, which you won’t, you could become popular on the sheer value of your content alone.
Now let’s flip that…
What if you don’t develop good content but you excel at marketing and link building? Will the same apply?
No.
The heart of a blog is content that people want to read, view, or listen to. And they want to tell others about it. Now, let’s not get cocky and just think it is a simple matter of “content is king.” Odds are, with the massive amount of content on the web today, that even with good content your blog could just sit there with no readers for a very long time.
That’s the other thing that pro bloggers figured out…
Once they understood how to market their blogs they quickly realized how much time they wasted just writing great content for a few visitors per day. Some pro bloggers have been blogging since 2002 and even earlier. It didn’t have to take them as long as it did to get popular. They just didn’t know the marketing techniques that go with great content development. So they had to wait for the web to discover THEM instead of launching themselves to the web. But, First Thing First!
In the Content Development section of this site you will find all the tricks for coming up with great, sticky, crowd-pleasing content that will grow your readership and get into the search engines. You have to have something worth visiting before you start marketing the site, or it’s all for nothing.
But I Can’t Write!
That’s fine. But anyone can blog! This site is called Blog Success, not Writing Success! But you will find yourself becoming a better writer in the process. Writing is like anything else. You get better the more you do it and study how other successful bloggers write.
* * * * * * *
Attention = Money
Everything about having a profitable presence online revolves around getting attention. Every website owner from beginner to the largest company wants all the attention they can get for their site, ads, products, content, or services.
With blogging it is no different. For your blog to thrive and profit, it needs targeted traffic…attention! But wanting it and getting it are two different things. We are all fighting for attention. The internet is a gigantic popularity contest. The biggest the human race has ever waged in our history.
Sound Daunting?
Don’t let the perception of massive competition for visitors fool you. Out of all the websites on the web, a tiny fraction makes up the most popular. We are here to put you into that elite group. And it isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds! Most Sites Suck!
Most sites on the web, as you’ve noticed, are really crappy places to visit. If that weren’t the case, you’d have hundreds or thousands more bookmarks than you do. The reason your bookmark file is manageable isn’t because of your “bookmark discipline” or your pickiness. It’s because there really isn’t that much out there on the web that moves people to bookmark or subscribe. 5+ years ago I would have told you that by 2009, everyone would have picked up on the fact that you have to actually do something, anything, remarkable to get noticed and be “bookmark-able.” I thought it was obvious then, and that everyone with a website would have figured out the game by now.
Very few site owners have figured out the game to this day. Most sites on the web are still crap. Most people who throw up a site are still just phoning it in. Most websites, to this day, don’t have any content “worthy of devotion” as my friend Clay Cotton puts it. Most sites in every niche have owners who think you can just slap together some junk and “make it big.”
Here’s the Big Secret to Getting All the Attention You Need: Don’t Suck! You must set yourself above the rest of the people in your market. You must be remarkable and stand out. Sound hard? It really isn’t given that most sites, well, suck. The big, magic formula (and you can go back to your very most favorite sites on the web to verify this yourself) is that good, high traffic, profitable sites, including blogs, are remarkable in some way.
Smacked In The Face
Have you ever been surfing and you just seem to hit one poorly designed, crappy site after another? And then, just as you are about to give up, you click one more link and BAM! A site the likes of which you haven’t seen for weeks or even months smacks you right in the face. The content is exactly what you’ve been looking for. The navigation is easy to understand. You seem to find something great around every corner of the site on every link you click. Its that moment when you think to yourself that you can’t get this site into your bookmarks fast enough. You can’t wait to tell someone else about it. You devour the content, and once you catch up with everything on the site, you wonder when the owner is going to post again so you can read, view, or listen to more of what they have to share.
Again, you may be thinking to yourself right now: “How am I ever going to create that feeling for people? Sounds like you have to be a genius to do that!”
More than anything else, this site is here for the exact purpose of training you to build one of those remarkable sites. And that’s how you are going to get the attention you need to make your site profitable. Excited? A little bit? Good. Because right now the only thing standing in the way of you and blog success is a bit of time, some learning, discipline, and application of what you learn here. That’s it. As you go through the training you will start to believe this is really possible. That you can be one of those super popular bloggers that people talk about and follow. You will learn how to put together an interesting blog around an interesting topic and drive traffic to it like a pro without ever worrying about whether you have what it takes. You have everything you need right here. Take it seriously.
* * * * * * * *
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
We’re about to point you to an extremely well-done resource for beginning SEO. It is one of the best written documents on all the important points for SEO on the web today. But Before You Go! The way we train you to set up your blog, the software we use, along with the plugins and settings we use, will get you 95% to the finish line with SEO. The absolute necessities for optimizing your blog posts for the search engines are as follows:
1. Your Post Title: Always keep your titles as brief as possible with your main keyword phrase for the post as close to the front of the title as possible.
If your keyword is Leash Training, then… “Leash Training Your Dog” is better than “Training Your Dog To Walk On A Leash” for the search engines.
2. The Post Body: In your first paragraph, following the keyword example above, you want your keyword to appear as soon in the first sentence of the first paragraph as possible.
Paragraph One of your Blog Post
“Leash training is a necessary evil for all dog lovers. It might not be as much fun for you or your dog to spend a day on this important training, but walking properly on a leash is good for you and your dog’s safetly and well being. Here’s how to put the fun back into leash training while getting the job done in less than 1 week.”
The Rest of The Post
From here on out, don’t stuff your post with the keyword phrase “leash training.” Use natural language to describe the probems and solutions and let it flow. The worst thing you can do is make the post hard to read and far too “dense” by using your keyword too often. If it sounds funny or if it doesn’t seem to fit or read well, you probably need to choose better wording to make the post something worth reading. You are going to have natural placement of the word “leash” in a post about leash training. You are also going to have natural use for the word “training” by itself in a post like this as well. Your keyword phrase DOES NOT have to be together (leash training) to have an affect on your search engine rankings. “Leash” and “training,” no matter where they appear throughout the post, will support your case to the search engines that you should be ranked well for “leash training.”
3. Links: With a post constructed properly as in the example above, the only thing left to do is getting links to it.
Google, for example, judges content by cheating. They like to see what OTHER people think of your content before making up their mind where you should rank. So they look at all the sites in their index that link to you and decide how many of those sites really matter in your niche to give you a score for ranking. A link to your post is a “vote” from another source on the web for your content and its relevancy. So getting other bloggers in your niche to link to you is crucial to making the top 10 rankings in Google. If you are networking with other bloggers and they are following your content, or they find you through a link on a social site, then it depends on how good your post is whether or not you will get natural links to it.
A good mix of links from inside the posts of other bloggers (who point to you as a resource to support what they are talking about) along with social links from your social networking and other social profiles (fans of your site who submit you to places like StumbleUpon) will usually ensure that you beat all other similar articles on the topic in the engines who have fewer links.
The only sites that will beat you for your key phrase after all the above has been done are sites with more “authority.” This means older sites that Google and others have a longer history of “trust” with and sites that overall have more links than you do. You can overtake more authoritative sites in time through good habits of link building and writing great posts with the SEO techniques outlined here.
