“What am I going to write about today?”  This is one question that surfaces for many Constant Content writers.  Constant Content is about connecting freelance writers with publishers looking for material.  But who are these publishers and what are they looking for?  What topics are they interested in?  How can you best spend your writing time so that you’ll be likely to make a sale?

To help guide your writing efforts we did a little bit of digging to determine which topics/categories have had the greatest number of articles sold.  This listing goes all the way back to 4 years ago (2004) when the site was started so it is the best long term trend information that we have. This list is by no means that ONLY places where articles have been selling, so please don’t read this list as the only place where an article will sell.  This is really here just to give you an idea of SOME of the categories that TEND to be popular.

Without further ado, in order they are:

1. Computers
2. Gardening
3. Tutorials
4. Trivia and Facts
5. Home Decor
6. Home Improvement
7. Real Estate

For many of you it will come as no surprise that Computers is the top of this list.  Whether the articles are basic introductions to new programs, specific guides on how to do some easy or complex task or comparisons of popular programs, computers continues to be the topic of choice for many of our publishers.  If you’re a regular hacker, consider writing about your latest exploits.  If you’re a luddite, like the rest of us, perhaps your position on the learning curve could be your asset, set out to learn something interesting that you’ve been meaning to learn for a while (some ideas that come to my mind are: What is Phishing? or Top 7 Tips for Avoiding Viruses).  Educate yourself about the topic and then write an “Introduction to …” style article.

The home related topics are also popular choices.  Gardening, Home Decor, Home Improvement and Real Estate, all these topics relate to where we live and how we can make the house a nice place to be are something that we can all engage with.  Keeping up with the Jones is a popular pass-time and by the sales in these categories it looks like it will continue to be for some time.

Finally, there is the learning related categories: tutorials and trivia and facts.  The Internet has become our go-to resource for finding out how to do new things.  If we don’t know how to do something, for better or worse, we’ll probably look it up on the internet before we canvas our friends.  Consequently, there is a demand for great how-to articles.  An article that is well written, informs the reader, and walks them through some difficult process is going to be an article that gets saved for later or shared with friends.

As mentioned early these aren’t theseven only popular categories, just the top seven.  We fully encourage people to follow their interests and write about things that excite them.  After all, when your interested in a topic you’re going to do a great job of research and a great job writing the article.  However, for those who just don’t know where to begin, these are some good places to start.

One of the thing that constant-content.com offers publishers who are looking for freelance writing is unique content.  There is a great post about unique text versus unique content that I think is really worth discussing.

The basic idea is that unique text is what you get when you visit a few internet resources on a topic and rewrite the content that is found there.  While the text is unique, its not really what we (or search engines) would call unique content.  For unique content there needs to be some great thinking, synthesis and understandability in the content.  Hopefully, there will be a few “A ha” moments and after a real live person has read the article they’ll feel smarter, entertained, perhaps even enlightened.

In some cases, unique text is produced by just taking an existing article and applying a thesaurus to the words and doing some minor sentence structure reorganization.  While this is unique text, it is tantamount to plagiarism.  The article may not be identified as duplicate content by search engines, but from a readers perspective there is no value that has been added to the article.  In cases where we get submissions that are just rewrites of previously published articles we consider this a form of plagiarism, with all the associated consequences (see Professionalism and Plagiarism in the Writer Guidelines).

The internet is really great when it provides you with just the answer you were looking for.  When you want to to convert your old  your 1985 mix tapes to digital you want to find out How to convert tapes to MP3’s and you want that article to be spot on, so you don’t have to search again or go anywhere else. And from a search engines point of view, that’s what they want to give you.  It’s unlikely that an article is a rehash of some one else’s work will ever be as popular as the original.  But an article that draws together a number of scattered sources and adds great style and some original thinking to the mix is going to be a great article.  And as previously mentioned, quality sells.

This metaphor from SugarRae.com really hits the idea of unique content on the head

“Think of content like movie plots. When a movie is predictable or the basic plot has been done ten times before, you want to see something new – a new spin from the director, a better level of special effects or an unexpected twist to the plotline to name a few. If a movie is a repeat of five others you’ve seen before – and it doesn’t give you anything new aside from different actors, how likely are you to see it again or recommend it to others?”

And in the end, having unique content, is not just so that a search engine can spider it and pick up a few keywords, it’s about providing something that is interesting for people to read.  Something that will help them on their way. Linkable Content.

Interestingly, unique content is also really linkable.  For people running their own websites, having text that people link to is like having someone on the internet vote for your site.  For people building up a website, links are an important aspect of building their reputation and rank.  Good links to your site aren’t easy to find.  However, links to interesting content are easy to share.

[Edit: to add a little more detail on the line between plagiarism and summarizing, Thanks Ed.]

Many people that purchase articles on Constant-Content.com for their website.  In fact, most of the articles purchased on Constant-Content end up finding a new home on the web.  When buying articles for your website, it is important to consider what keywords your content contains and how this will reinforce your position in search engines.

To help buyers visualize what keywords they are buying we’ve introduced the keyword chart.  Before I go on about the keyword graph, I want to emphasize that having keywords in an article is ONLY ONE aspect of a great article.  An article is great when it is informative, engaging, easily understood and well written.  These human elements of an article are equally, if not more, important than keywords.  Unfortunately, they’re also difficult for search engines to quantify.

Keyword Graph for Article on First Time Mortgages

The internet is becoming more and more  search engine driven, google has become a verb, and as a consequence keywords have come to play a role in helping search engines return the right results to our searches.  Publishers need an easy way to see what keywords they will be introducing onto their site with any new article, so we have introduced the keyword chart.

As the title of the graph says, we are creating the keyword chart based on the words found in the summary.  Consequently, the keyword chart is just to give publishers an estimate of the keyword density of the entire article.

This new tool will help publishers be confident in the articles that they choose to purchase and help their sites rank well in search engine results.  If you have any other ideas for new tools that would be helpful as a customer or as an author, please comment or add your voice to the forum where some of the other writers have posted their suggestion or new ideas.