News: Introduction To Creating Content

This article is all about creating content. This is a very important concept to grasp because the content that you will learn how to create is going to be the basis for how you will advertise and promote your website. Content, meaning articles, videos, and even podcasts. Content is now really the new advertising. Instead of traditional types of advertising and instead of the traditional separation between editorial content and advertising, that has gone the way of the dinosaur.

I was in magazines for many years. In magazines and newspapers, the articles and photographs were the content, the editorial content, and then you had advertising. Now you are going to use the editorial content to attract people the same way advertising used to do.

You are going to use it to attract people to come to your website. So you are going to create this content and post it on external websites. You can place or post all kinds of content for free on all kinds of websites. I use a database of about 150 websites that I use to place content, and these sites are all different types – news, blogs, video sharing, article directories and social networking.

What you are going to want to do is to create interesting content, interesting articles, videos, or podcasts, about your product or service. Not about your company necessarily, but about topics of interest to people that are related to what you do.

For example, if I had an Italian restaurant, maybe I would write articles about different types of dishes. Making videos is even better. Make a video on how to make lasagna, how to make spaghetti and meatballs, or whatever. Interesting things that people will want to look at.

Every time somebody goes on the internet, what are they doing? They are looking for information and they are looking for all kinds of information. You might think, "Oh, people aren't going to be interested in what I'm doing," but you're wrong. There are billions of searches every month by millions of people and they are looking for all kinds of information. This is why you want to create as much content you can about your company or as much content as you have time to create.

And there are other ways you can get content that you can use and I am going to talk about this in another article but the important thing to remember right now is that you don't have to create all of it yourself. Really, all you have to do is to create relevant content and distribute it to as many different relevant websites as possible.

That is the most important thing. In doing that, you are going to run into issues involving copyright that maybe you hadn't thought of, but in previous times and currently still of course, with magazines and newspapers, if you printed something in a magazine you would not want anybody else to print it. Why? Because you want them to come to your magazine or newspaper and to have to read it, because that is where your advertisers are and that's how you make your money.

Also, people buy newspapers or magazines and people make money there. You don't want a bunch of people using your articles, photographs, or whatever. It is all different on the internet. I want as many people as possible to see my articles. I don't really care who uses them or why they are going to use them, for the most part.

For example, I had a restaurant that was a client of mine and I produced a restaurant review. I put it on a bunch of websites. I put it all over the place. This helped him to have a very dominant position in the search engine results pages. He was in the top 10 with multiple listings for a lot of different terms.

What happened eventually, is that I put Google Alert on his website. A Google Alert is a way for you to keep up on a topic that you are interested in and on your own website. What Google does is they look around the internet for these terms and if you put the name of your business, for example, in Google Alerts they will send you an email every time they find something about your business on any webpage on the Internet. So I did this with my client.

And, every once a while, maybe once a week or sometimes more, I would get a Google Alert. Then, I started getting alerts from pages that I've never seen before and websites I had never seen before. I didn't put articles on these sites. What happened was someone went to one of the sites where I did put the article and they had copied it. Then they put it on their site. And normally you would say, they are stealing my material. They kind of were, but I didn't care because it was a review about the restaurant. Basically, what they were doing was giving me free advertising.

Now if you wrote a generic article about Italian restaurants and somebody stole it and said it was their own article, then you wouldn't be real happy about it. But this is different. This was about my business, about my client's business. And so the more places it shows up, the better. So there are many different examples of how copyright issues have changed with the advent of the internet and there are many more ways to consider how your content should be used.

Tom Aikins is an SEO consultant and online marketing expert based in Bangkok who presents seminars on these subjects and also offers a complete online marketing training course on his website, http://www.seonorthamerica.com. You can ask questions of him by contacting tom.aikins@gmail.com.