Keeping your website fresh
Coming up with something new and interesting is always a difficult task because the Internet is full of people who want to have their voice be heard as far as they can shout it.
New blogs and websites are born every day containing countless and various topics of discussion and over time, a few webmasters become the #1 go-to when it comes to that specific topic. Some people are good with gardens, others are good at chess, hi-tech, home keeping … to put things simple, they know how to do something that most people don’t just as well. That is…
Their talent
Then, following this logic, starting out by creating posts about something that you know, will probably pay off. Because you’re more comfortable you’ll be able to write more articles about it on shorter time spans, thus making your blog/website become richer and richer.
But obviously, it still requires you to create something that will attract the audience: if you begin by saying a bunch of nonsense or something that is simply offensive and won’t help anyone, people will obviously look down on you and classify your site as an unreliable source of information, never to return again, even if you post diligently.
The keyword here is help. Your content must be of interest and already have a specified target audience. Although you won’t need to actively control that since your content will determine the type of people who appears on your website. Content influences the age group of people coming to see it. And taking that under consideration, your best bet is creating content that is likely to attract the most active people online (between 16~65 years).
Come up with something that will help people to achieve a goal (How to X?). People are constantly looking for services or products they can either acquire for free or do for themselves.
You don’t need to start your own eHow or something of that nature; don’t try and reinvent the wheel, just pick a specific theme of conversation and elaborate posts regarding how to do this and that… that are connected to what your site/blog is supposed to provide.
Also, try to develop articles that can improve one’s life quality or make life easier. People won’t directly search for stuff like that, so you have to attack from the flanks; instead of writing posts like “10 ways to improve your life”, write about “How to lose weight without chemicals” or “10 Top tips to a better professional life”. It’s less broad and will only attract people who are specifically interested in the topic of discussion you wrote about.
Your topics must present new solutions to problems that arise when dealing with your field of work, some other way of reaching the same or better result using more effective methods or should try to reverse engineer what already exists into something that is yet to be created.
The latter is best known as “Spin-off”. You get something that was designed for a given purpose, but now you rebuilt it to execute a task completely unrelated to its original purpose but it is just as useful or even better. This happens a lot on military research.
Are you creative enough to do something like this in your area of expertise?
But as long as your content gives a reason for people to come, bookmark it and return when they need again, or recommend your site to someone else, you’re good to go.
You don’t need to spend days walking outside with a notebook looking for an interesting topic to talk about, if you’re the type of person that doesn’t exactly know what to write about, you can simply write. Just post the first thing that comes to your mind.
This will actually be new content, plus you’re giving people want they like to hear the most: the truth. They like to know if, a site is legit, taxes are going to rise do they need to spend a lot of money on something, as a few examples. You don’t need to talk exclusively on what happens over the Internet alone because, obviously, there’s a world beyond it, and for the most part that’s what people are more interested in.
If you don’t feel like writing, you can always let someone else do it for you; have your own readers get a chance to write about something that’s connected to what your website gives support to or just pay someone else to do it.
Most articles are between 600 to 1500 words or more, so try to elaborate a bit, but don’t go off topic, people will gradually lose interest if you go off on a tangent and bring a subject unrelated or that have little interest to the current subject, unless, of course, that is the purpose of your post or site.
What you write about, you have to check that yourself but at least now you know more or less how you write it.
Next up, how to direct traffic to your website. This is extremely important, so don’t miss out. I’ll probably break it down for ya in more than one post because this is where the battle begins.