Content ideas

Where you can get Content ideas?
What are your website pages going to be about?
And what information will be on them?

So you’ve decided on your theme. Great.

And you’ve probably got some ideas on how to introduce your theme to your readers – what your slant is.

Now you need content ideas. Start a list of all the pages you want on your site. It’s an evergreen list – once you’ve created one and organized it (see below) you can add or change items as you see fit. Your first stop should be the internet itself. Simply Google your theme and read your competitors’ websites. What are they writing about? How do they organize their information? You should spend time on the merchant web sites for which you want to become an affiliate. Some offer a lot of assistance – free articles, free web sites that you can copy or adapt (and don’t copy verbatim – Google will rank you lower)

Another source of ideas are free article websites. Why are there so many free articles? Because many of them are promotional, They all have the author’s link at the bottom. Some articles are even provided by merchants for their affiliates to submit. Nevertheless, it is well worth searching these sites for articles. They will often give you ideas for your site and also material that you can adapt.

Join an email list or newsgroup – such as a list on Yahoo groups. You can also use Google to search newsgroups. These lists vary greatly in quality. Some are just spam, others are full of superficial posts but some have great posts, great debates – and questions from members that will give you ideas.

Check out all the forums related to your site. What particular issues are people interested in? What problems have been successfully resolved? If you see questions, make sure your site has the answers.

Books – both ebooks an print books are yet another source of ideas and research material for content.

Just remember, you are not writing a novel. You are writing a web site, page-by-page, 200-500 words at a time. You don’t need to be especially creative – you need to be informative and that’s much easier. Don’t stress and don’t over-work it.

Finally, you’ll need to rework your page list. I endorse the simple 3-tier model provided by Site Build it. I find too many websites – including those from major corporations - are very “hip” but also unusable. Small black font on a red background. A screen so busy you have to peer at it to find the content or the right link. So organize your page list into Tier 2 pages – i.e. your subheadings – and Tier 3 pages – the nuts and bolts details on a particular topic Return from Content ideas to Site Content