Quality Content

Quality Content

Lots of people will tell you to create lots of quality content without ever giving a legitimate definition of what quality content is. The web is a big social network, and the trick is to get your messages to spread further and faster than your competitors. Usually, creating more pages does not do this as well as creating a better idea.

The Web was designed to save people time or give away useful information. The closer you can align a portion of your business model or website with those concepts, the better chance you have at achieving extreme success.

While many SEOs hold back their secrets so they can profit from them, I give this e-book free to charities and post most of what I learn to my blog. I not only help people, but my syndicated network grows. I have been found by prospective customers from word-of-mouth in forums I have never heard of. One day I got a thank you e-mail from a person from a religious forum and about ten minutes later got a thank you from a person from a pornography forum.

What is Quality Content?

Quality content is conceptually unique content that people would want to read and link at. If you want people to pay attention to you it is important that your create content that is conceptually unique. The following article by Sugarrae explores this topic more in depth:

Writing Ideas to Spread

Rather than being so focused on search that you try to match keywords, you can also market certain ideas with the intent to spread. By writing a headline that is juicy, intriguing, or controversial, you stand a much better idea of seeing that idea spread. Search engines follow people. If you spread good ideas then search engines will trust you.

Brian Clark’s CopyBlogger offers great headline tips in his post titled “Magnetic Headlines” at http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/.

Multiple Customer Types

I need some people to want to buy my e-book. “Buy my stuff” is not an easy message to spread though. I also need other people to link to my site. Just like I need to sell my e-book to have a business model, I also need to give others a reason why they would want to link to my site because that will market my book.

Working From Your Strengths

I am typically a bit goofy in the things I say or do. It is why I have created many funny or fun-type websites. It is far easier to be myself than to pull off some sort of act.

I am not the best copywriter, and I do not write the best sales letter pages. If you read the 33 Days to Online Profits e-book that comes as a bonus, it will include lots of content about copywriting. Many of the links are not worth buying from for most people. Much of his information in his report about search engines is inadequate or incorrect.

However, I still note this document because it shows some copywriting techniques that may be helpful. You only need to be great at one thing to be extremely successful on the web. Yanik Silver is good at selling people stuff with compelling copywriting. I do not suggest that you buy most of the stuff he links to in 33 Days to Online Profits, but I do recommend you glance at how he writes copy.

Write Content to Target the Ideal Prospect

When you write content, you do not want to create something that makes everyone happy. You want to write to the ideal target customer because your writing will have the greatest effect on the people you are trying to target.

If you write too broadly, or try to make too many people happy, then your ideal prospects will not convert as well, as they may become disinterested or offended by attempts to write to less-targeted prospects. The lower quality prospects are going to convert poorly no matter what you do.

The reason many hyper-focused sales letters are still a mile long is because the people who are most interested in the topic are more inclined to want to keep reading.

I did SEO for a customer where we increased his monthly sales from $3,000 to around $12,000. I then tuned his page copy for his ideal client. With the same marketing spend and same rankings, we increased his sales from $12,000 to over $40,000. Even better yet, he was making greater profit from fewer customers by targeting the larger spenders.

Sales Letters

Some websites are exceptionally transparent in that you can tell they are all about making as much money as possible. By reading through the sales letters of various written-to-sell websites, you can see some of the tricks they use to sell.

A hard sell does not make sense for all people (and may offend some of your customers), but I could probably increase my income by about 50% if my sales letter was harder selling. Sometimes it is a bit hard to balance profitability and being easy to link to.

Clarity is Key

Many organizations aim to manipulate language to make it lose its meaning. If you are small, one of the biggest advantages you have over competitors is that you can put yourself into your brand and ensure that your writing is clear and easy to understand. Since you have fewer stakeholders, it is easier for your writing to more clearly represent your thoughts.