Predictable Income from Content Sites

by Sid Hale

"Now that content is King...". How often have you heard that lately?

Well, I've got a secret. Content has always been king on the internet. Without it, there would be nothing to link to, nothing to search for. In short, no web.

It's just that some are finally beginning to "get it".

Over the past six months or so, there've been a dozen or more new software tools released to automate various aspects of content site creation. They fall into three basic types of tools

Content Rotators
Directory Generators
Article Page Generators

All of them attempt to provide an edge with the search engines so that you can get high search engine placement and the resulting traffic boost that will result from higher placement. Of course all of them imply that they are the answer to all your traffic problems.

Let's take a more realistic look at what they do and how they can work for you.

Content Rotators:

The Content Rotators are geared toward showing the search engine spiders different content every time they visit a web page. That's because the spiders track how often a web page changes, and will schedule themselves to revisit more often if they detect that a page changes frequently.

Unfortunately, the fact that your content changes frequently doesn't increase the page's relevance to any search phrase, so by itself it won't produce any increase in search results ranking or in your traffic levels. In fact, unless the rotated content has a very high keyword density, it can actually reduce the keyword density of your page - resulting in lower search result rankings for your web page.

It's important to understand that the ONLY function of rotating content is to increase the frequency that the search engines spider your site. That's not to say that frequent visits by the search engine spiders doesn't have value. It does!.

Getting your site spidered more frequently means that any new pages you add to your site will be indexed more quickly, and that is the first step to getting ranked. But please don't be misled into thinking that putting up a page of rotating content is going to get your web site highly ranked in the search engines. Providing fresh content is just a technique to get the SE spiders to visit more frequently, so this technique has to be used in conjunction with other content with high keyword density to have any value.

There are other ways to provide fresh content (without buying a piece of software to rotate a collection of articles).

If you regularly add new content pages to your site (a new article, for example), that new content is enough to get your entire web site re-spidered as long as the new content page is properly linked to the rest of your site (that's how spiders work).

Or, you could add an RSS feed from some other site to just one of your existing pages (using a free script). In fact, an RSS feed displayed on your site looks very much like the article snippets that many of the content rotators show on your web pages - to both your visitors and to the search engines.

All that is left to do is to inform the search engines that you have new content. By creating an RSS feed of your site's content, that is updated 2 or 3 times a week, you can accomplish just that.

Either of these will get your site spidered more frequently.

Directory Generators:

The directory generator tools focus on creating hundreds - even thousands - of keyword rich pages. Each page focuses on a tightly focused set of keyword phrases to increase the keyword density of each page.

The very high keyword density increases the relevancy of the page in the eyes of the search engines, and many have had these pages quickly rise to the front page of search results for their chosen keyword phrases.

But...
The biggest problem with these pages is the content that they generate. Every generated page is a directory of links to other sites. That means that the very same keyword rich content that will attract search engine traffic, is also the path for your visitor to leave your site.

It seems rather pointless to create high-ranking web pages just to send the resulting traffic to someone else's site.

The secret to being even the least bit successful with this type of tool requires achieving the right balance of generated content (outbound links) with links to your own income producing content (affiliate links, AdSense ads, Opt-in forms, etc.) If you can't achieve the right balance to convert some of that traffic to your own purpose - why bother?

note - I've been pretty active in a private forum for the past few months, and as of this writing, a number of the other participants have been grumbling that their directory generator type pages have dropped totally out of the rankings on the major search engines. There seems to be a move by Google and Yahoo (and maybe others) to penalize pages generated using these tools.

Article Page Generators:

Of the three basic types of content generators, the article page generators have the potential to create sustained high rankings in the search engines. That's because their focus is on publishing topic-specific information, and that focus is consistent with the primary goal of the search engines - to deliver results that are relevant to their customers' search.

These tools search the article directories, ezine directories, and news wires for articles where the author has given permission for the article to be reprinted. By searching for articles in a given category, or by keyword phrase, they can find content relevant to almost any topic and generate a web page for each article found. By making these article pages available on your web site, you increase the value and "stickiness" of your site overall, but more importantly, you add keyword rich pages that can be indexed and ranked by the search engines - resulting in more free traffic to your site.

By actually re-publishing the articles on your own web site, there is no need to link away to some other site (as with the directory generators)

Since most of these tools allow you to control the "look and feel" of the generated pages, you can match the theme of an existing site, or create an entirely new niche site with your own theme.

These tools aren't all the same.

I own three different article page generators. They all allow me to supply an HTML template that is used to generate the pages. That means that I can include things like site navigation links, AdSense scripts, affiliate links, etc. in my template and the generated pages will be complete. They won't need any "tweaking" after they are generated. They will be linked into the rest of my site, and contain relevant ads to monetize the new content.

Of the three I own, only one (Content Site Builder) searches for articles by keyword phrase. At first, I didn't realize just how important that was, but after using the other two for a while, I realized that downloading all articles from a given category resulted in a lot of articles that were only marginally relevant to my topic.

The additional download time was significant, but really only a small part of the problem. The real headache came when I had to cull out those articles that weren't relevant to the site I was trying to build. If I was lucky... I could use maybe 2% of the articles in any given category. But the only way to know which 2% was to scan every single article. It would have been just as easy to go straight to the article source and only download those that I wanted.

Since Content Site Builder searches for articles by keyword phrase, I can get articles that are relevant - without downloading all the non-relevant junk. Now I find I can use 90+% of the articles I download, and with a lot less work. Add that to the fact that Content Site Builder is constantly being upgraded with new features, exclusive content that isn't available anywhere else, and integration with a new automatic blogging tool and...

I quit using the other two products.

Unfortunately, you can't buy Content Site Builder. It's only available with a Content Desk Charter Membership, and those were sold out in the first week after the release. Like any membership site, there will be some attrition of members, so every month, at the beginning of the month, I expect a few slots will open up, but not many - and they won't last more than a few days.

Check the date. If you're reading this around the first of the month, it might be a good idea for you to have a look at Content Site Builder.

About the Author:
Sid Hale is the owner of several successful websites including ad-CLiX.com and Info-Syndicate.com, and is co-creator of jvAlert - a membership site for facilitating high-level Joint Ventures.

Join thousands of subscribers who benefit from our highly informative iMarketing iNsight ezine.

Stay up to date on the latest developments, tips, techniques, strategies and expert interviews by joining us now. Feel free to browse the archives!