Adding Value to Your Articles is a Key to Success
OK, you’ve just spent the last four hours writing the latest article for your web site. You poured your heart and soul into it. You checked all your information, wrote the article as if you were talking to a friend, and checked your spelling. You love your topic and you love sharing what you know about with others. Yet, as you look up from your screen and rub your eyes, you say, “Wow, this is hard. There must be quicker and easier way.”
So you do a Google search on “writing articles,” start poking around on a few internet marketing forums, download some free e-books and sign up for ‘internet article writer made easy’ mailing list. You start to read web sites that are promising “automated article writing,’ and a variety of other ways people have made untold fortunes in two weeks on the internet with no skills and no work. All their “secrets” are there, and they’re only $99.95. Fortunately, you’re smart enough to see those for what they are, so you keep looking.
You also come across a sharp looking and rather intriguing little web site offering proof that if you write about stuff you know… share with others that which fills your heart and makes you get up in the morning… they can help you build a profitable web business based on it. And they have “proof” that great content is king. You smile to yourself. You already know about that one. So, you keep looking.
Then you see this one “Making a Fortune Online Without Writing a Single Word!” Now, this one is for me, you think. After all, your fingers are still aching from that last article, you’ve got a headache, and you’re still putting in the eye drops. “Well,” you say to yourself. “This looks promising. It would be great not to have to write all these articles anymore. Work smart, not hard, that’s what I always say.”
Things are never as easy as they seem
In order to have a website that will attract attention, get people to click on it, and keep them there, you need to actually add value to it. If you look closely at some of the main players on the web: Google, CNN, Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft, they are all focused on providing value. Whether it is creating original content, sharing other authors original content, helping others develop original content, or adding products and services that allow you to get at the content – all of what these companies do increases the value of their website and the internet.
They attracting millions of people and making some serious money, yet not one of these companies would characterize what they do as “easy money.” Could you imagine Amazon.com being built from information found in a $97.00 ‘Make Money Without Writing!’ e-book?
They had to work for it. You will too.
Value of your website is closely tied to the quality of the information on it. Good information equals value. Original information not commonly available anywhere else equals greater value.
Regardless of its format (articles, entertainment or games, images, artwork, etc.) unique original information is what makes your website a worthwhile place to be.
So, that little article you just wrote sitting in front of you has something to say that others want to know about. It is original. It is unique. It is yours. It has value. But, unfortunately, it time and effort to write and then it has to be found….overcome all the other information out there on other websites begging to be red.
Noise on the Internet
The internet has primarily been an exchange of information, and your website is part of that communication network. One of the internet’s greatest strengths is that in almost an instant. We can get information about whatever questions have.
A study done in 1999 concluded that 45% of the web pages indexed in search engines were “half-finished, meaningless, or trivial”. Almost half of the internet has become useless, and that number is rising. All this noise, or junk, has increased because of a trend that’s developed recently. It’s because of “Fast Content” or “Trash” websites thrown together just to make a quick buck. I call it spamming the internet.
This “quick and dirty” process usually involves scraping (stealing) content from actual, useful web pages on other websites and using software to automatically build a web page whose sole purpose is to fool a search engine into thinking this is a document that actually has something to say; that it provides meaningful content. Then they put AdSense ads on it and sit back and wait for the clicks.
Doing this allows a lazy, naive and short-sighted person to presumably earn some pocket change in the short term while doing little work. The result of this nonsense is an internet full of noise: duplicate content, most of it meaningless. It has no value whatsoever because no one wants to read it.
Don’t write for search engines, write for people
- Any money made using this approach will be relatively small and short-lived because if anyone actually clicks on the site, they’ll quickly click the “back” arrow and leave the site…forever. They will absolutely never return. All that was accomplished in the transaction was a waste of time, energy and bandwidth.
So, the reality is there’s no easy way around this to build and maintain a quality website. Just keep writing articles with integrity, originality, honesty and love. In the long run, you will rise to the top of the search engines, stay there, attract a lot of interest and visitors, and drive new potential customers to your business.
But why does it have to take so long?
Why can’t you just put up your article and have thousands reading it that day? It has value; it’s something that people want to read it. Why aren’t they?
They will, but you need patience. The internet has gotten pretty big and there are lots and lots of “noise” out there. Even the major websites and players have to deal with that fact.
Just for fun, do this simple test. Try to see how many web pages there actually are on the internet. Do a Google search on the letter “a” or the word “the” and look at the number of matches returned. The Last time I tried this Google returned 9,970,000,000 hits (yes, that’s billions). 9.9 billion pages, a monster number. And likely about 5 billion of those hits are junk. Oh, and this exercise only returns pages that have English characters in them. So, what about all the pages and documents and videos Japanese, Chinese, German, etc. Oh, and Google doesn’t have every page on the web indexed even in its giant database.
Geeks who’ve actually studied this stuff say that Google only indexes about 16% of the documents online. Moreover, if you count something called the Deep Web, those pages not indexed by conventional search engines and reside behind firewalls or dynamic web portals, the web is some 500 times larger than your search request will return. That puts the size of the web somewhere around 500 to 600 billion web documents.
Here’s an interesting thought. There are around 200 billion stars in our galaxy. That’s 2.5 web pages for every star in it. T hat’s a lot of web pages. So, that article you’ve just written is now, literally, a pinpoint in the giant internet galaxy.
How’s anyone ever going to find this great new article you’ve just written and posted, much less read it? It’s not enough to just write your article and put it on a server. It’s not enough to just be unique and original. Now, you must have the skills or possess the tools to get the article above the noise and indexed in all the search engines. Fortunately, we have extremely effective process of doing just that. We can get your article can now be heard over the noise.
There’s only one secret to the internet![]( "Website Content")
Success of your website is tied to only one thing….to how many people read your web pages. In fact, I would say it is the definition of success on the internet overall. If you have a lot of people visiting your site, you are uniquely positioned to affect decisions they make. You can help people you’ll never meet; you can offer products and services for sale; you can ask for donations, and you can place ads on your site. With increased visitors to your website comes the opportunity for increased profit.
But, you need to do it right, the “hard way”. Presenting tens, hundreds or thousands of useless pages on your website for sole purpose of getting clicks is doomed to failure because of the evolution of the search engine algorithms.
Believe it or not, the search engines are actively looking for your little article, but they have to sift through all the junk to find you. So it takes time. They’d love to know about it because it contains actual valuable information. They want to include it in their database because they know others are looking for it. They want to provide you with an audience.
The problem lays with those 9.9 billion other web pages. Remember, the search engines only manage to index about 16% of them. Search engines need help.
The only secret to success on the internet is to provide the search engines, and the people using them, with what they want: solid, quality information. Do this faithfully, honestly, thoughtfully and with originality, and you will eventually gain a large audience. Your article will be found in the galaxy of the internet.