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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen
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That’s all there is to it. If you aim for each of those three points to run around 300 words, with another 100 or so for the introduction and conclusion, you’ll have your article.
If you wanted to write an article for a gardening blog about the right way to choose a bonsai tree, your plan might look like this:
There are lots of bonsai trees available, so here are some principles to guide your buying choices:Climate—There’s no point in buying a tree that’s going to die in your garden.Shape and size—What look suits your garden best?Care—Do you want to prune and train the tree yourself, or do you want one off the shelf?Keep these points in mind, and you’ll make the right choice.
Now, I don’t know whether those points really are important factors to consider when buying bonsai trees. But I do know that this structure is the simplest way to plan effective content on the Web: an introduction, three main points, and a conclusion.
Make the introduction hard-hitting. In RSS feeds and on blog home pages, users will see only the first few lines of the article, and they’ll use those lines to decide whether to continue reading. Your opening should be powerful and interesting enough to create the kind of curiosity that pulls readers in. And if you want to make it a little special, try to make sure that at least one of those main points is unique and original. When you’re writing on a popular topic, don’t just repeat what everyone else has said; give it a unique perspective—ideally, something drawn from your own experience.
Statistics can also help to show that what you’re saying is factual and well researched. You can find them on sites like
census.gov
,
fedstats.gov
, and the web sites of professional associations. They make your arguments look convincing and give readers solid facts that they wouldn’t have known otherwise. Saying that “according to the Nursery Sellers Association, sales of bonsai trees have grown 83 percent in the past four years” adds weight to your post.
census.gov
,
fedstats.gov
, and the web sites of professional associations. They make your arguments look convincing and give readers solid facts that they wouldn’t have known otherwise. Saying that “according to the Nursery Sellers Association, sales of bonsai trees have grown 83 percent in the past four years” adds weight to your post.
That structure is a basic model that you can always call on when you’re planning content. You can adjust it for articles of different lengths and add or take away paragraphs depending on the topic. The structure itself isn’t important. What is important is that you use one every time you sit down to create new content.
Content can come in many different forms, and all of them have their value and their uses. Here are seven of the most common types of content that you’ll come across online, together with their strengths and weaknesses, so that you can choose when and how to use them.
How-to articles are the most direct way to transfer your practical skills to your readership. They’re like short manuals that teach a skill. Tim Carter’s site is packed full of them, and they don’t all have titles like “How to Grout” (although that is the name of one of his videos).
The main strength of these kinds of posts is that if you have the knowledge, they’re very easy to write. You simply want to take the readers by the hand and guide them step-by-step through the process of accomplishing the task. The format is largely the same whether you’re explaining how to lay tiles, create a layer in Photo-shop or perform a cobra in yoga. It’s all very simple: Just tell people what they need to do and, ideally, toss in a few pictures to show them. Scatter some ad units in appropriate places on the page, and KaChing, you have profitable content.
As an additional bonus, content like this tends to stay fresh for a long time. A post explaining clearly how to build a deck will be as useful six months after it was posted as the day it was written. Your site won’t degrade in time, but will grow increasingly valuable as you add new content.
The disadvantage of how-to articles is that posting a large number of them turns your site into a practical resource. Visitors might stop by when they want to know how to knit a sweater or back up their hard drive, but it’s unlikely to form part of their casual reading.
That’s not necessarily a problem. Sites like these can still make lots of money. But an online manual might not be the type of site you want to produce.
News sites are among the most popular on the Web, but they’re not necessarily the most profitable. The big news companies like Fox and the BBC already have reporters in place who send back content, so for them, the biggest challenge has already been met and the biggest expense has already been covered. When it’s just you, you’ll struggle to bring in original content.
There are solutions, though.
AppleInsider.com
is a news site with no original news content at all (
Figure 3.1
). It simply aggregates news stories about Apple from around the Web. Anyone interested in following what’s happening at the iPhone maker can go to one place and find all the information they want. For the publisher, ads for Macs and iPods will always do well on a site this tightly niched. Alternatively, it’s always possible to throw the odd news article into any site and show that it’s dynamic and up-to-date.
AppleInsider.com
is a news site with no original news content at all (
Figure 3.1
). It simply aggregates news stories about Apple from around the Web. Anyone interested in following what’s happening at the iPhone maker can go to one place and find all the information they want. For the publisher, ads for Macs and iPods will always do well on a site this tightly niched. Alternatively, it’s always possible to throw the odd news article into any site and show that it’s dynamic and up-to-date.
There are a couple of problems with writing news articles, though. The first is that unless you’re breaking the news yourself, you’re going to be rewriting. Cutting and pasting content from a news site is illegal, wrong, and may earn you rude e-mails from lawyers. You’ll certainly hear a loud KaChing then, but it will be the sound of your money going out. So, you’ll have to rephrase the content and state where the information is coming from so that the copyright owners can see that you’re not stealing their product.
Figure 3.1
Applelnsider.com
provides news-and ads-about Apple and the products Apple fans like.
Applelnsider.com
provides news-and ads-about Apple and the products Apple fans like.
The second problem is that while news sources are currently free on the Web, it doesn’t look like things are going to stay this way for long. News Corporation (owners of the
Wall Street, Journal
and a host of other newspapers) has already said that it plans to start charging users in 2010. Other publishers are waiting for News Corporation to make the first move before they bring in their own subscription models. That will make aggregating news on your topic more difficult. On the other hand, it will also make your site more useful to people who don’t want to pay multiple subscription fees to different news sites. Best of all, once users are accustomed to paying to read quality content on the Web, they’ll be more inclined to pay you for your content, too.
Wall Street, Journal
and a host of other newspapers) has already said that it plans to start charging users in 2010. Other publishers are waiting for News Corporation to make the first move before they bring in their own subscription models. That will make aggregating news on your topic more difficult. On the other hand, it will also make your site more useful to people who don’t want to pay multiple subscription fees to different news sites. Best of all, once users are accustomed to paying to read quality content on the Web, they’ll be more inclined to pay you for your content, too.
News articles tell people what’s happening. They’re at their most valuable when the information you’re providing is exclusive or when it’s closely related to the subject of your site. But you can make news articles even more useful by combining them with analysis.
This can make all the difference between having just another web site in your field and owning a successful, important web site in your field. Whenever anyone reads the news, the question they always want answered is, “What does this have to do with me?” That’s true whether they’re watching Fox broadcasters explaining the deficit, a local newscaster reporting on the opening of a new car park, or a sports reporter interviewing a coach. While all of that might be interesting information, viewers want to know whether they’re going to be paying more taxes, spending less time looking for a parking space, or getting a piece of information that will help them win an argument in a sports bar. Tell your users why the news is important and what it means to them, and you’ll be transforming content that everyone has into unique information and demonstrating that your site is the place to come for expert advice.
For example, in October 2009, the Federal Trade Commission wheeled out a bunch of new guidelines governing the use of testimonials and endorsements in advertising. It was horribly complicated stuff, but it was vitally important to anyone who sells anything online. Anyone with a web site that sold products needed to know about the new rules, so it was no surprise that site after site reported the changes. But what I really wanted to know was what the changes meant. What was I allowed to do, and what did I now need to do differently? I contacted my lawyer for advice and, with his permission, shared that advice on my web site. You can read it at
www.TwitPWR.com/newftc
.
www.TwitPWR.com/newftc
.
This isn’t just a news article saying that the FTC has brought out new rules. There were thousands of articles saying that. This is a professional opinion explaining what that news means, and it’s one of the most popular pieces of content on my personal blog.
Clearly, you don’t have to ask a professional to explain the news for you—although there’s nothing wrong with doing that and many will agree in return for the free marketing. You can also analyze it yourself, giving you another easy and valuable piece of content.
Review articles are among the most popular types of content, not because they’re easy to write—they aren’t—but because they’re very easy to monetize.
Create a site that offers reviews of new computers, for example, and you can be sure that many of your users will be people interested in spending thousands of dollars on a new machine. Next to your review of the new Mac, you’ll be able to place an ad, and if your readers are interested in making a purchase, they’ll be able to click through and spend their cash. Advertisers will be confident enough that it’s going to happen to pay you lots of money to tempt people to buy their products. You’ll find it very easy to get targeted ads, and you’ll find it very easy to convert users into buyers ... provided you can produce good reviews, and that’s the tricky part.
When you’re reviewing iPhone apps or candy bars, it’s not a big deal to spend a few bucks for a solid review. But you won’t be able to spend thousands of dollars every time a new flat screen television comes out or each time Apple launches a new laptop. And companies won’t send you review samples until your site is an important enough player.
Sometimes, your readers won’t expect you to have actually tried the product. If you’re enough of an expert, they’ll come to your site hoping to read detailed analyses based on the product’s specifications. You’ll be able to say what should make the new machine better than the last model and what it should be able to do. But unless you’ve tried it yourself, the review will always be missing something important.
It is certainly possible to make money from a review site based on opinions about new products you haven’t actually been able to try—and people do it—but it always feels wrong. When it comes to writing reviews, it’s best to review things that you’ve actually tested yourself. You’ll limit the number of reviews you can post, but you’ll get much better results, both in terms of your site’s reputation and in terms of click-throughs and sales.
Most of the content you create will be intended to inform and entertain. Sometimes it’s also worth creating content to bring in traffic. List posts do that by promising content that can be absorbed at a glance rather than read in detail. Whenever users see a post that promises to reveal “12 Ways to Strip a Car” or “The 43 Most Powerful Left-Handers in Government,” they know they’re not going to have to work too hard to pick up that information. Each item is going to be just a few lines long, so they’ll be able to learn by skimming.
These are exactly the kinds of articles that are most likely to be shared, e-mailed, and recommended on social bookmarking sites like
Digg.com
(
Figure 3.2
) and
StumbleUpon.com
.
Digg.com
(
Figure 3.2
) and
StumbleUpon.com
.
BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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