The Internet plays a vital role in many people’s lives today. Through the decades, the Internet has evolved from a novelty to a tool that is used in almost every aspect of one’s life, from paying bills and ordering groceries to communicating with friends and family to earning an income. Because the Internet is so dynamic, webmasters must constantly deal with the challenge of simply keeping up with regular changes and the latest innovations and trends. That means that regular website maintenance is essential to ensure that visitors are getting the very best information possible.

Update frequently – it’s essential
Consistently updating a website’s content is the only way to maintain a competitive edge. Here is a look at the importance of updating certain aspects of a website to ensure that users are getting the best experience possible which will, in turn. result in improved sales and a better online presence.

Types of website content
There are two types of content on a website: that which is static and that which is dynamic. Static content would include the likes of the “About Us,” “FAQ,” and “Contact” pages, whereas dynamic pages might include the news section or blog. The dynamic content should be frequently updated and should be relevant at all times. Static content should also be updated, however, it does not need to be done as frequently.

When updating the content of a website, it is not only important to ensure the content is relevant and fresh, but also well crafted. New search engine algorithms require that content be well written for the human eye rather than for the search engine spiders. The focus should be on original, quality content that is not just limited to the written word but should also include infographics and videos.

If a webmaster fails to update a website for a significant period of time, that website will fail to keep up with the constantly changing market. This can mean certain doom for any online business because the website will almost certainly lose its ranking in the search engines, and every webmaster knows the lower the rank, the fewer the customers.

Hiring a competent copywriter to maintain a blog is not the only way to keep the content of a website updated and fresh, though it is an excellent way to attract regular visitors and engage the customer. Today, social media plays a vital role in the success of a content marketing strategy. Therefore, any business should have a presence on the leading social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where customers may obtain the latest information and engage with the business.

Developing quality content and promoting it effectively can be an expensive process. It is important, then, to develop methods to get the most out of each piece of content created. There are a number of simple ways any Internet marketer can get more out of each piece of content they create.

1. Trickle Your Content
When it comes to benefitting from your content, you can use two different methods. Either you can save time or save money but, ideally, both. Trickling your content is an ideal solution to save time. A lot of people fall into the trap of creating too much content too quickly and then feeling obligated to publish it immediately. As news and current events change continually, many online marketers are creating large volumes of evergreen content.

Trickling your content is an ideal solution to ensure you are always publishing content consistently because you can upload it within a few minutes and set it to automatically publish for months.

2. Keep An Eye On Old Content
A good way to save money on your content marketing efforts is by keeping an eye on old content. This enables you to find out what type of content your target audience is consistently interested in. You can then generate new content based on the topic or view of older content which is still receiving a substantial amount of attention. Also, you can then tie new content into older content which will gain more views for each of them.

3. Your Focal Point Should Be Quality
Spending time and money on content that provides little benefit is a total waste. It is essential to always closely focus on quality over quantity when it comes to content generation if your goal is to get the most value out of each piece. Not only does high quality content provide immediate benefits, but it is also easier to repurpose and repackage down the road. This, in turn, allows you to use the same basic piece of content repeatedly while requiring only a one-time investment.

4. Locate The SEO Sweet Spot
It is also important to focus on saving money and time when it comes to search engine optimization. Apply too little SEO and your content will never get the attention it deserves. Too much will result in a significant waste of resources. You should be able, over time, to find out what the SEO sweet spot is within your niche or industry.

5. Set Goals For Your Content
The fifth way to benefit from each piece of content is by purposefully identifying the goal of each piece of content. Most of the best content is information related rather than a sales pitch. Those that frequent the Internet have become extremely good at identifying content that is little more than a blatant sales pitch. This results in it frequently being ignored and it will not gain the traction required to provide significant benefits.

When creating sale specific content, ensure you use it differently than your informational or educational content.

High quality content is easily worth its weight in gold and can provide great benefits for years. To maximize the ROI of each piece of content, it is vital to create it, publish it and then promote it as efficiently as possible.

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A far more effective alternative is to take your time to ensure every blog post you create has the potential to engage your audience. This is much easier than most people would think when you follow a step-by-step process.

Step 1: Choose one key topic
Your first step to creating a blog post that will actively engage your audience is identifying one key topic to focus on. One common mistake many bloggers make is to try to discuss several topics in the same blog post. You should make good use of sub-points but they should not be independent ideas. Each sub-point should provide supporting thoughts that emphasize your key topic. You will not overwhelm your readers when you focus on one key topic. Also, they will then know exactly what to expect from every one of your blog posts that they read.

Step 2: Pinpoint one way your blog post will actively help your audience
Choosing the right topic to discuss is only half the battle. Finding a way to actively help your audience is something you also need. Taking the tutorial or how to approach is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this. This approach unfortunately isn’t compatible with all topics. However if you have decided to promote a service or product then you can still provide value to your audience by pre-empting their questions and providing direct answers. One good way to get ideas to help your audience is to browse active forums to find out what questions people have or problems they are experiencing. Then your blog post can help them by addressing these.

Step 3: Be sure to identify how every blog post will help your online business
Many bloggers also make the mistake of not treating every blog post as a valuable asset. Although it is essential to focus on your readers’ needs, you also need to ensure every blog post fits within the goals you have for your home business. You can accomplish this easily by always adding a call to action at the end of the content. Rather than using a generic call to action at the bottom of every blog post, you will find it is more effective to create a unique call to action based upon the central topic of your blog.

Step 4: Be aware of the importance of formatting
It is astounding how formatting alone can change how someone views your content. If you use subheadings, key points and block loads when necessary, you give your readers visual interest. Their minds will automatically be more receptive to the message you are trying to share when you engage them on a visual level. Your audience will naturally find themselves valuing what you have to say over your competition, which is an added benefit of proper formatting.

Step 5: Get the most out of your title on every post
The title of your blog post needs to achieve two goals simultaneously. Not only does it need to grab your readers’ attention but it also needs to tell them exactly what they are going to read about. Give your title some serious thought because a great, attention-grabbing title does you no good if the content doesn’t match it. It won’t be long before your readers begin to ignore your titles altogether because they know you will not live up to your promise.

Following these five simple steps for every blog post you create will actively engage your audience, share your message in an effective cohesive manner as well and helpcestablish your credibility within your readership.

First of all, I want to caution you not to get caught up in trying to measure the success of individual articles. Article marketing acts as more of a combined effort with multiple articles being submitted consistently over time, rather than having “success” tied up in how any one article does.

The real gauge for how your article submission campaign is doing is where the web pages on your site are ranked in search engine rankings for keywords associated with your niche. With consistent article submissions that are geared toward those keywords, you can improve where the pages on your website appear in Google’s rankings. That is the sort of change that can dramatically affect the traffic to your website over the long-term.

Unfortunately for those who like to see immediate results (that’s all of us, right?), impacting your search engine rankings is an ongoing process that does not yield immediate results. It takes time and effort, but you will not be able to submit one article and then immediately see an impact in the search engine rankings. Rather, by consistently making article submissions over time, you can gradually influence where your web pages are appearing in Google’s rankings.

Back to the question about article views over the entire Internet – there is not a way to measure that. You will, however, notice that many popular article directories provide statistics that apply to their own sites, so you can see how an article is doing on one particular directory.

The “article views” statistic that you see on a directory indicates how many people have looked at the page where the article is published on that site. Article views go up over time, so articles that are more recently published will tend to have fewer views than articles that have been around for a while.

What if you have several articles that are about the same age where one has a significantly higher number of views than the others. What does that mean?

It could be that the topic of that article really filled a need, and you may wish to explore that subject matter more deeply in other articles to capitalize on that.

It could also be that the title of that article was more attractive to readers – the title is what will draw people to read your article. Is the title of that one super-popular article different from the rest in style? Maybe it was a provocative title, maybe it was a title in the form of a question, or maybe it was different in some other way. If it was, then you can use that knowledge to experiment with titles in similar styles.

Another thing to consider with a very popular article is if you did keyword research to determine the topic and did you use the keywords in the title? Even if you didn’t, you may have inadvertently keyword optimized your article, which resulted in more search traffic being sent to that particular article.

It’s always a good idea to create titles and build articles around popular keywords for your niche. Those keywords are what your target readers are typing into Google anyway, so why not deliberately create content that satisfies the needs of the people you want to attract? If you do that, then your article has a much better chance of being read by more people.

Attracting a lot of readers for an article is very satisfying, but keep in mind that your article marketing success is not tied up in the performance of any individual article.

You may have one article that is published in a popular ezine that sends scores of readers and customers to your website and blows your sales sky high, while you have other articles with more modest initial views that end up paying off in more subtle ways over the long-term. Really, it takes the combined momentum of regular article submissions and, with consistent submission over the long-term, you can gain a higher search engine ranking, which can in turn dramatically increase the traffic that comes to your website.

Although a Page 2 listing will drive some traffic your way, you realistically should be on Page 1 if you seriously want to compete in your niche or market. This means your page needs to be ranked in the top 10 results. It takes a fair bit of work to achieve that, and your workload will increase with the number of competing sites using your keywords. To establish who your main competitors are, do a search on Google using your keyword.

Types of Google Searches

To use SEO content writing to its fullest benefit, it is important you understand how many other web pages are using your keyword choices. If you carry out a search using the bare keywords without delimiters, the results will display pages that contain any form of the keyword, with the words in any order and even with synonyms for your keywords. For example, a search for the keyword ‘writing tips’ with no delimiter is liable to produce results including ‘writing tips, ‘SEO writing tips,’ ‘article writing tips’ and any other phrases using these words in any order. Pages that contain just one of these words may also be listed.

By using the keyword in the form ‘SEO content’ the results will include web pages using only that phrase, although it could be used as part as a longer key-phrase such as ‘SEO content writing tips.’ If you employ square brackets with the keyword: [writing articles], the results will provide pages containing only that exact phrase in the correct word order.

If you carry out a search for your keyword using each of these forms, you will see the number of other sites using the same form of the keyword just below the search box on the results page. That is the competition you are up against.

Meta Data Tips

Don’t be dispirited if you have a lot of rivals – the vast majority of these pages will be of poor quality, and you will easily beat them with some simple SEO techniques.

Using the proper Meta content is an important example of this. It is surprising how many sites, even those designed by self-proclaimed SEO web designers, fail to get the Meta content correct on every web in the website. Here are some tips:

Meta Data: The Meta data appears in the head section of your page HTML. This the section of your HTML just prior to the body section where the visible elements of your site are coded. Only search engine robots will scan the head section, which you should use to tell the spiders what your site is about before they check for themselves. When the spiders reach the ‘body’ section, the contents of the ‘head’ section are not visible on your web page.

Title Tag: This what Google uses as the title for your listing, not the title you use on your page. It should exceed 59 characters counting spaces. Not everyone agrees on this number, but I suggest it because that is what Google seems to use in its own title tags. Use your main keyword at the start of the title, and a minor keyword before the end – you will not have room for much more in 59 characters.

Description Tag: This is the text that appears beneath the title of your search engine listing. Include your main keyword early, and describe the meaning of your web page. Use a maximum of 160 characters counting spaces.

Keyword Tag: Not many search engines use this, but it does no harm to include it. List three to five keywords or phrases separate by commas – you could list more, but most searches rarely use this. Five is enough for those that do.

Check out the source code of web pages that are competing with you for your keyword. The source code shows you the format you must use for your Meta data and also the keywords being used by your main competitors among some other useful data about their websites. Visit the competing web page and right click on the page. Then left click on ‘view page source’ on the drop-down menu.

That is the first fundamental lesson in SEO content writing: make certain all your important Meta data is included. This is important to search engines when formatting your listing. If you have no Meta data, or it is wrong, you will your chances of achieving a high ranking. Getting the Meta data right is probably among the most important website article writing tips that you will ever be given.

Creating Your Liquid Content

Let’s first determine that content is the creation of your stories that are to be expressed through every possible connection (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Each story must add value and significance to your customer’s lives. Your content is your “brand conversation” – it is also what will keep your current customers interested and convert new customers. As such, your content must be engaging.

Liquid content can be described as the elements of your brand conversation that circulate freely. The fluidity of ideas means that no one model can do it all. The need for multiple connections is key. Be sure to include ideas/stories from brand fans or your brand ambassadors.

Five principles to adhere to when creating liquid content:

1 – Inspire participation
2 – Connect creative minds
3 – Share
4 – Continued development
5 – Measure results

To help with the development of your liquid content, you have to manage the flow, define your north star (big impact idea), bring out creativity in all you work with, ensure clarity in your thinking, embrace risk, incubate creative ideas and create a culture of creativity.

World-class creative ideas need tension for them to thrive. You need to use conflict constructively as it can produce outstanding creative thinking.

Applying the 70-20-10 Investment Principles to Your Content

When you begin creating marketing content, it is beneficial to have a strategic plan. And yes, if you are writing your own blogs, doing your own Facebook ads, writing your own posts and updating your website then you are a marketing.

Seventy percent of your posts should be low risk. This is your daily content that pays for rent and is a pathway to the 20 percent.

That 20 percent of your content should be derived from what you know works from the 70 percent. You should engage with a specific audience but still have a broad appeal.

Ten percent of your posts should be high-risk content. These are fresh, new ideas that you are gambling on. You need to be prepared for them to succeed or fail and to celebrate both.

I cannot stress it enough. You need to measure all of your results. You need to know what works and what doesn’t work to ensure you are making the best decisions.

Get ready to launch your conversations and to be patient. Don’t move on too early. Learn to fuel the conversations you have for the long-term. It is a new world for communications, and you need to produce a new north star. Who knows, maybe one day you will join those companies at the top.

Here are seven tips for turning blog content into article submissions:

1. What kinds of content from your blog can you turn into articles?

Any content that teaches the reader how to do something and is not sales-oriented.

Free reprint articles are also sometimes called “educational articles.” Their purpose is to educate the reader on a topic having to do with your niche. You, as the expert, are in the position of “teacher” in all your articles. You can include sales-oriented material in your resource box (rather than the article), which usually sits below your article on the published page.

2. Focus on writing blog posts that contain educational information about how to do something practical in your niche.

People who are reading your articles will be looking for solutions to problems. Think about the types of questions your target readers have and write articles that provide the answers. Also, think about the types of things your target readers need to know how to do, and then teach them how to do those things through your articles.

3. When re-writing a blog post to be submitted as a free reprint article, the content needs to be written in a more formal manner.

Many times the writing on a blog can be quite informal, because you’re the editor and you can publish anything you like. When you’re submitting free reprint articles, however, they need to pass editorial approval first. Most editors will appreciate a professional sounding article.

Another thing to keep in mind is he people reading your blog may already know you – they know your sense of humor and the way you think, but the people who are reading your articles will probably be “meeting” you for the first time. For that reason, it’s a good idea to put your most professional foot forward.

4. Articles should be free of spelling and grammar errors.

If you make a mistake on your blog, you can easily edit the post. It’s not a big deal. But when you submit an article, it will be published on many different websites and you won’t necessarily have access to edit the content should you spot an error after the fact.

The readers of your blog will often be completely new to your work, so they won’t know you usually write well and that the mistakes they’re seeing in your article are uncharacteristic. You only get one shot to make a first impression. Keep in mind the article you’re writing may be the only article of yours that some people see.

Finally, submitting an article isn’t the end of the line – a publisher has to agree to publish the article before it can do your marketing efforts any good.

Publishers will routinely decline articles that are poorly written, so it’s worth it to spend extra time proofreading your article.

5. Don’t link to other sites in the article body, unless necessary.

You can link all you want on your blog, but most publishers have rules concerning the links that are in articles. Firstly, most don’t want you to link to your own website from the article body. (You can, however, link to your own website from your resource box.) Some publishers also don’t want you to have any links in the upper half of your article. Some publishers restrict the number of links they allow in the article too.

A good practice to make your articles as attractive to as many publishers as possible is simply not to include links in the article body, unless you can’t avoid it. Try to write content that does not depend on outside sources.

6. Pick topics that will stand the test of time.

Free reprint articles will potentially be published on websites around the Internet forever, so choose content that is evergreen and won’t become obsolete.

7. Totally re-write the blog post before submitting it as an article.

The reason you do this is to ensure the content on your own web pages remains unique. Content that can’t be found anywhere else is more highly valued by search engines, so re-writing your blog content before submitting it as an article is an SEO strategy.

You can look at the main points of your post as being the starting point of your article, but the article itself should stand as a totally unique piece of content.

Our Kindle Story

I launched on Kindle about seven weeks ago with a ‘How To’ book on overcoming alcohol abuse. Now I have a plan to launch a number of others as soon as I get sometime.

My next book will be about my 12 years in property investing here in the U.K. with Sam Russell. It is a diary, if you like, that will launch in about two weeks. Already we have sold a few copies, and that’s before doing very much marketing. But our anticipation is longer term, so having sold a few is a great start so far.

Kindle is awesome and it will definitely change the way people read.

The ‘Kindle Craze’ can help to turn you into an expert author. Once you’re the proud author of a series of highly informative titles in your niche, your products will sell themselves.

Creating Your Masterpiece

It all starts by creating an eBook. The same basic rules apply. Take a specific topic that your target market is dying to know about and create an informative, easy-to-read ‘how to’ book on that topic.

It’s always good to check out the marketplace before you start writing. Have a look at Amazon and see what titles are hot in your niche. Look at those books so you can give yours a unique slant.

Once it’s written, convert it to the format of your choice and upload it to Amazon. Here are a few advanced tips to make it work for you:

Don’t Get Greedy

Kindle publishing is more about establishing your name than about making money. However, it is possible to make piles of cash publishing there. To do this, flood your niche with titles. Pump them out and cover every topic. Make yourself unavoidable to your target market.
With Kindle publishing, your books need to be priced competitively. Look at all of the titles on Amazon for Kindle – even bestsellers are amazingly cheap. You want your helpful and valuable eBooks to be a good bargain. That’s how you get sales and getting sales is how you become known.

Quality Matters

If you’ve published your own eBooks on your site, you’ve probably let a few things slide as far as grammar and spelling. Don’t do that with Kindle. Your writing needs to be of professional quality. If you’re writing it yourself, consider having a professional editor or proofreader look at it.

Whatever you do, don’t patch together resell PLR and pass it off as a book. Lots of people have tried this – it’s basically like scamming people. Not only is it unethical, but nobody will bother checking out the URL to see more. Your books have to be good and really give people value.

One more thing NOT to do with Kindle is put affiliate links all over your titles. It’s against the rules and they bust people for it. Amazon has gotten pretty strict about quality and ethical standards, so be careful.

You may have noticed this with some of your own articles. You may have read your article a million times then, a week later you read it again and think, “How could I have missed these obvious mistakes?”

Writers can use a variety of little tricks to help them to see their content with fresh eyes. The key is to make the article appear as unfamiliar as possible so you can read it objectively and spot errors.

Here are eight article-marketing tips for detecting grammar and spelling errors in your article submissions:

1. Use a different font and change the color of the font. Also, you can make the font size bigger.

This helps trick your mind into thinking it is reading a brand new piece of content. If the words on the page look different, then your mind perceives the article as being less familiar. The larger font also helps you to spot errors.

2. Print a copy of your article and proofread from there.

You’ve probably written your article on your computer and have been reading it on the computer as well. By actually printing your article (try changing the font, font color, and size before printing), it can help trick your mind into thinking it’s reading something it hasn’t seen before.

3. Listen to your article being read aloud.

You can slowly read it aloud yourself, or you can enlist the help of a friend. Some word processing programs even have a tool that will “read” the text you’ve written aloud.

Hearing your article read aloud is very useful in spotting misspellings and grammar issues.

4. Take it from the bottom.

Instead of reading your article in the normal way, start at the last sentence and read up from there. By taking each sentence out of context, you can more clearly focus on the structure of each sentence.

5. Give your article a break.

This is the most obvious way to make proofreading easier. Simply take time away from your article. An overnight break should help considerably, but if you can take a few days away you’ll be sure to come back to your article with fresh eyes.

6. Get a second pair of eyes to proofread for you.

If you have a friend who has excellent grammar skills, ask him or her to proofread your article for errors.

7. Read through your article checking for different things each time.

The first time you may just check punctuation. The second time you may be looking for subject/verb agreement. The third time you may look for spelling issues. Being systematic in the way you proofread your article helps ensure you don’t miss anything.

8. State things as simply as you can.

Be on the lookout for confusing language or any points that are repetitive. You’re not just looking for grammar and spelling — examine how easy your article is to read and understand. Avoid sentences that are long and complicated.

Proofreading your article may seem like a big job, but it gets easier if you use the tips in this article. Even if you have read your article dozens of times during the creation process, the proofreading stage requires special attention and different tactics. The tips in this article will help you to thoroughly proofread your article so that by the time you submit it, your article looks professional and is something you can be proud to be associated with.

So, amid all this confusion, what is the perfect length for an article submission?

I think 600 to 800 words is a good length to shoot for. That gives you enough room to provide helpful information on a topic without making the article so long that you lose the interest of the reader.

Here are some things to keep in mind when considering word counts of articles:

1. Your articles must pass the approval of publishers. It’s not enough just to write an article and submit it – article directories and other websites have editors who review the articles before they are approved for publication. If your article does not meet the basic requirements, the article will be declined. Word count is one of those basic requirements.

2. Your articles must be appealing to readers. If your article is extremely long, it can be a turn-off for people who are simply looking for the answer to a question. Most people don’t want to take the time to wade through a 2,000-word article to extract the information they need. Keeping your article to a manageable length allows people to find the help they need as quickly as possible. You also benefit, because the more helpful your article is to readers, the more potential visitors your website will receive.

3. Search engines are not as important as the actual people who will be reading your articles. Search engines are really just trying to evaluate which content on the Internet has the best chance of answering the various questions and searches people type into the search box. Instead of gearing your word count just to reach the minimum that a search engine would require, focus on creating articles that will be helpful to readers.

4. Word count isn’t everything. Most publishers will have a minimum and maximum word count they will allow but, aside from the number of words, the article must contain valuable information. Your goal is not just to create an article in the 600- to 800-word range. Your goal is to create a unique and original article that provides useful information and is written in a way that is easy to understand.

You don’t have to look too far on the Internet to find sub-par content that looks like it was written without any thought. You’ve probably seen content that appeared to be written more for search engines than for real people, and you’ve wondered what the author was thinking by producing such nonsense.

I’d like to encourage you to have a, much more long-term concept of the value of the article submissions you create. Taking the time to write a 600- to 800-word quality article that really provides helpful information to readers will pay off in the long run in multiple ways.

Your article will be attractive to the most publishers possible and, as a result, the article will generate the most backlinks possible. Additionally, the article will serve as a helpful resource for readers and a source of direct traffic to your website for many years.

It helps to keep in mind that article marketing is about more than just building links. It can be an effective form of communication, and it brings you and your business to the attention of potential customers. It allows you to help the people your business is geared toward. People are much more likely to trust you with their business if your article has helped them in some way.

Word count is a necessary aspect of creating content that publishers and readers can use. Keep it at the back of your mind and do a word count check before finishing your article. It’s not the only point of consideration when evaluating your content, but working within a word count limit is a discipline that will benefit both you and your readers.