Website content is the most critical and painful thing to write. Success means making money with your website and this occurs only if you have great content.
The trouble is it is easier to get lost in researching the "perfect article" or finding something else to do, than it is to start an article, finish an article and get it up and away. It is very easy to get sidetracked when you are attempting to write content, this should be strenuously avoided.
The basic thing to do is to establish a way of approaching the project at hand so that you can adopt the same route for each article, just change the subject.
Ultimately a well written article is paramount. Composing a well written article will obtain the best results for you.
Divide your article into easy to handle parts so you can manage each section individually. I would recommend this as the best way to go. That way you can conquer the problem piecemeal and, over time, you will find it easier and easier to undertake to produce fine quality articles.
Number one task - create the content. Depending on your attack it may well need a little research, but not perhaps as much as you would predict.
For example, let's say you are merchandising a product through an associate website. Subject matter for your articles are fairly accessible in threre areas.
The affiliate website will usually have information and pictures of the product that you can copy and paste.
Don't forget, arguably the best way to obtain information and current photos of your product, is to go to the Manufacturers website.
Search for alternative review pages as these might offer further information that you can include.
BEFORE WE GO FURTHER, I MUST OFFER A WORD OF WARNING.
Avoid duplicated content as all search engines, including Goodle, frown on this. It is however key that, once you have copied and pasted the wording you should scan through it and convert it so that the final article is as fresh as you can make it.
As an instance of rewriting, you may have copied: "Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was white as snow"
With a bit if careful thought that could be rewritten to read "Mary was the proud owner of many sheep, but her favourite was the small snowy-fleeced lamb"
So as you can see, making the words say the same thing in a different way may not be as hard as it looks.
Content Creation
As we stated earlier, the first thing you need to do is create your content.
There are three main ways to achieve this but they increase in cost as you progress.
The D-I-Y approach – This is free apart from the time you spend…but it is very time consuming. The DIY approach is a good idea to start with so that you can get a really strong idea of what constitutes a great article. This will certainly help should you decide to move on to the more expensive options below.
The PLR approach. PLR stands for Private Label Rights and these can be purchased from a number of different sites from a few cents each.
The ELANCE approach. If you wish for a professional writer to complete your articles, you can go to a site like Elance to hire one.
Which is best? Well that really depends on your current requirements, ability and available funds. Let's break it down into a bit more detail.
1 – The D-I-Y approach
If you find it easy to write your own content, then go it alone. If you can not write good articles, you might find this task impossible. However they do say there is no gain without pain and, as we showed earlier, a little thought about the process can make it easier than you think. Copying the manufacturers description of a product and rewriting it is not as hard as it looks if you take it a sentence or two at a time and just try to think of ways to say the same thing they have said using different words.
So try it as practice. Go to the web page of a product that you like and know something about. This could be any product you like, including household, favourite drink or passtime product. Copy and paste the description of the product into a word document and then rewrite it a sentence at a time until you have changed pretty much every word. Peruse it again to make sure that spelling is spot on and that it makes good sense when you read it. Using a product that you know something about makes this an easier process for learning because you can more smoothly spot when something may not quite make sense.
Once you have done this a couple of times go for your chosen affiliate product and produce your first article. Around 500 words is a good length.
Yes it will be hard to start if you are not a wordsmith naturally but practice WILL make perfect and, as we said before, articles are really important in the process of ranking your site.
2 – The PLR approach
PLR (Private Label Rights) articles are arranged by someone else and can be purchased through many separate sites on the web. They mostly come in packs of articles and, once you have purchased them, you can do whatsoever you like with them. They are yours to use as you wish.
You can do everything from making your own ebook to using the articles on your own site to sending them to article sites. One of the best and most reliable is PLRPRO. However they are not the cheapest. Just go to your search page and type in PLR articles…you will soon see how many there are.
However, now is the time for another warning. With PLR articles, there are two major areas to watch out for.
Firstly, if you have bought a pack of articles, it may well be that the vendor has sold say 100 of that pack so there will be others out there with the same articles that you have and we already noted that search engines do not like duplicate content. Rewriting them is the only alternative. Yes I know you could therefore have written them yourself but at least someone else has done the research for you.
The second concern is the quality of the articles. There are some atrocious ones about and, as Forrest Gump was heard to say "You never know what you're gonna git…". Many of them have been written in English by people that have no idea about the language. Hence my previous mention of PLRPRO who seem to be able to produce pretty good copy most of the time.
Below are the opening two paragraphs of an article I found with a brief search on an article site under the heading of:
BURN CALORIES TO REDUCE FAT
When you ask that question of sweat burning calories, one of the more important issues to realize is that it all depends on the reason/s why you are sweating in the first place. Is it by doing active sweating or by passive sweating?
Let this straightforward article be of great help in your fat loss goals. The tried and tested tips for burning calories within these paragraphs will show you why it's different from the rest of the pack that doesn't deliver anything at all. If you are one of those people with slow metabolisms don't despair yet, there are things you can do to burn those extra calories without going to the gym.
If you try you can understand what it says…just…but it is not well written. I am sure you see what I mean with the dangers of PLR articles.
3 – The ELANCE approach
One of the best ways to obtain a writer for your article is to go to http://www.elance.com/ They can produce work for you that will normally cost you between $3.00 and $15.00 an article depending on the amount of research to be done, the size of the article and other factors.
Their work will be totally original but this is where your efforts to write the articles yourself come into play.
