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Top XX Ways To …
Secret Revealed …
33 Great Tips …
These types of headlines attract visitors faster than a rat travelling up a drainpipe.
They’re shareable, and linkable, but does do their effects last in the long run? Can you really build a solid website out of snackable fun-sized candy bar content like this?
Fun-Sized Candy Bar Content
These small portions of content are great for giving you a needed boost in your daily website visitor numbers. They’re especially handy at bringing in visitors because of their snappy headlines and the quick promise of learning something interesting.
I don’t think you can make an entire website successful just with this kind of content though. At the start, I tried and failed miserably.
Although my visitor numbers were quite a lot higher on several occasions than they are now, the numbers would disappear as soon as I stopped posting those kinds of articles.
So what is the next step? What is the whole meal?
Useful Content
Everyone has something useful to say. Some sort of information they know about that others don’t – and I can tell you right now it’s not just the 7 most awesome web-based tools for twitter.
What I’m talking about is creating really useful content that people will actually use and get value out of.
Creating valuable resources is one of the secrets to blog (and website) success and is something that I’m personally still figuring out how to execute properly.
Useful content gets linked to by other sites, shared on Twitter, bookmarked on web bookmarking services like Delicious, gets stumbled on StumbleUpon, and dugg on Digg. All of these actions taken by your visitors bring you even more visitors and boosts the popularity of your article.
Some people call this kind of website content “pillar content“, some call it “cookie content“, and I just call it useful content. It’s content that seems to have no age dependency and is perfect for building steady search engine traffic to your blog.
Writing Useful Content
Essentially useful content is a longer form article that involves giving away useful information that your visitors can use. And it applies to just about any niche you can think of – not just the Make Money Online niche.
Think about a professional painter who offers a service offline for painting houses. How can he tap into the market of Do-It-Yourselfers and steal back some of that business?
By starting a business blog, he could appeal to the do it yourselfers by giving away painting tips, techniques, and more on his blog. Building authority as a well known painter along the way.
If he wrote a few good, longer articles with details tips on how to paint with a paintbrush for the best finish, how to use a paint roller the right way, what sort of paint to use for different weather conditions and why, and more along those lines he could secure visitors from Google looking for those topics that are trying to do it themselves.
And what happens when the job gets too big to handle? They’re remember who they were going to for advice and hire the master.
Using Different Mediums
Writing doesn’t have to be the only medium. Video is becoming more and more popular – especially for demostrating techniques to people. It’s much more expressive and easier to put together sometimes than the equivalent content in text.
If you must use text, split it up with pictures and step-by-step instructions. Perhaps even consider an accomanying audio of you explaining the technique.
Let The Useful Content Flow
Useful content doesn’t have to be hard work, it should flow like you were giving instructions in person to a friend, or talking about a topic to a group of your peers.
Read the resources I pointed out above on pillar articles and cookie content – re-read this post, and search for more ideas on how to create content that lasts. Put in the effort to create something that realllly stands the test of time.
You definitely won’t regret putting in that extra time now to create your useful content when it keeps on delivering for you for years to come.
I like the phrase “Fun-sized Candy Bar Content” Nice! This is a good definition of useful content.
Brian´s last blog ..HCG Diet Saves Lives
Cheers Brian thanks for the comment
Snackables aren’t enough, unless you’re Seth Godin!
Dave Doolin | Website In A Weekend´s last blog ..Blog World Recap: How to Attract a Large and Loyal Audience
Too right – Seth is the man, but it doesn’t quite work unless you’re already a blogging god.
Hi – thanks for this informative article. Please forgive this, my English is a second language to me. German is my native tongue but I am learning getting down English. See you later!
No worries Santo. My name is German but about the only thing I can say in German is hello. So guten tag to you!
[...] Friend me, StumbleUpon username dmdoolin. Hat tip: Thanks to Josh Kohlbach for pointing out how to link directly directly to StumbleUpon. Check out Josh’s article on Creating Linkable Useful Content. [...]