Poorly written website content can be a real barrier to attracting customers and winning sales. It may be tempting to reduce costs by producing your own website content or by contracting it out to the lowest bidder. This can be a false economy.

Many websites that relied on weak content found that their search ranking plummeted with the Google Panda update. To rescue their online presence, these businesses had to discard their initial content and begin again. Fresh, unique, well written website content is essential for any website that wants to secure a high search engine ranking or hold the attention of potential customers.

Too Busy To Write

When you are building up a business, your time is precious. You will be sourcing materials, designing products, searching out new markets, and developing a viable business strategy. The majority of online business owners are too busy building their business to find the time required to write fresh, compelling website content on a regular basis. Professional content writers can fill that gap by devoting the time necessary to construct interesting and innovative product descriptions, articles and blog entries.

Is Your Content Unconvincing?

You may think that customers will excuse poor grammar and patchy spelling. However, content that is riddled with errors can give your website an unprofessional look and feel. When potential customers consider dealing with you for the first time, they will be wary of the possibility of fraud or shoddy service. They are likely to be put off if your website content appears sloppy or poorly written. Low-cost content writers may lack the language skills required to write well. By outsourcing your website content to professional content writers, you can be confident that you will develop and maintain a credible online presence.

Dull Content Is Not Sticky

Website visitors are likely to hit the back button pretty quickly if your SEO content is uninteresting or unreadable. This has the potential to affect your search engine ranking, because the recent update to Google’s search algorithm gives credit for the length of time visitors spend on a web page. Professional content writers can give an interesting and unique twist to your website content that engages visitors and holds their attention.

The Perils of Mass Production

Search engine algorithms penalize websites that publish duplicate content. When you purchase content at very low cost, you run the risk that it has been copied, repurposed or spun in order to make it more profitable for the content writer, who can then sell the same website content several times over. Before purchasing website content, you should take steps to ensure that it is unique and has not previously been published.

By purchasing your website content from Constant Content, you can be sure that your articles, blog entries and product descriptions will be unique, engaging, and professionally-written. Quality website content is an investment that will pay dividends.

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Fresh, unique website content is vital if you want to attract attention from both search engines and individual visitors. Google’s Panda update reinforced the need for websites to publish new content on a regular basis if they want to appear near the top of search engine results. At the same time, website visitors are becoming more discerning about what they read and share.

Writing to a looming deadline can be a creativity killer. If you feel that the constant need for new ideas is putting you under pressure, take time out to plan ahead. Getting a schedule in place for your 2012 website content will relieve your stress while keeping your online presence up-to-date and interesting.

Scheduling website content for the year ahead is not as daunting as it may sound. With the aid of a calendar and access to Constant Content’s team of content writers, you can pull together your 2012 website content schedule in under an hour.

The Importance of Seasonality:

The changing seasons have an impact on many online businesses. Jewelry businesses will typically see sales peaks around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, while travel agencies are likely to experience a spike in January. A quick look at website activity over previous years will reveal the seasons that matter most to your business. Use the changing seasons to plan website content that will appeal to your customers.

Find a Unique Approach:

As your competitors will also target these seasonal peaks, your next challenge is to find a unique angle that will appeal to website visitors. You can secure innovative ideas by working with a team of content writers. Constant Content allows customers to receive submissions to public requests from a number of talented content writers, increasing the chance of a quirky, distinctive approach to your chosen topic.

Encourage Visitors to Return:

Once you have a schedule for the coming months, you can entice visitors back by trailing future website content. Publishing a teaser, such as “Next week we will reveal the secret to five-star travel on a two-star budget”, will prompt visitors to return to your website to read the new article.

Handle the Unexpected with Ease:

Planning ahead and having website content ready ahead of time will give you some breathing space if life throws some challenges your way. Illness or a staff shortage may throw you off track. However, it will have less impact if your schedule has been planned and developed in advance.

Allow for Flexibility:

Bear in mind that your website content schedule is a tool to help you plan. It should not be set in stone. If one of your content writers produces an intriguing idea, you are free to adjust your schedule and run with it. Don’t let a unique or creative piece of website content escape just because it was not on your original plan.

By planning ahead, you can satisfy the demand from regular visitors for valuable new website content, while securing a high ranking in the search engine results.

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The holiday season, the time from Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving) through New Year’s Eve, is one of the busiest times of the year for everyone, consumers and businesses alike. Spikes in traffic are almost guaranteed due to the flurry of parties, gift exchanges, and other special events that occur during the holiday season.

Getting Your Ducks in a Row for the Holiday Season

This holiday season is the perfect time to channel your creative forces into a marketing plan that directs traffic to your virtual doorstep continually and consistently. How can you make this happen? You need a plan that focuses on a variety of angles, taking advantage of the persuasive power of the type of original content that article writers can produce for the Web.

A Fresh Email Campaign Gives a Company Renewed Vigor

An email campaign is one of the least expensive, but most effective, strategies to use when trying to attract new customers. Using the creative forces of a freelance writer, you can easily incorporate an email campaign that tempts, tantalizes, and draws customers to make a purchase during the holiday season. Freelance writers are skillful at what they do, so creating original content that produces real results is a viable marketing strategy.

Are Your Blog Posts Lined Up and Programmed to Post?

Line up your blog posts before the holiday rush by hiring a freelance writer with the savvy to compose interesting, original content for your blog posts. Procrastination may be a choice, but it happens to be one that many people fall victim to choosing. Instead of getting into the “I’ll do it later” phase of business, get into the “I’ll hire a couple of seasoned article writers to create my blogs” stage of preparing for the holiday rush.

Tap into the Power of Social Media Websites

The amount of time that many consumers spend online each week increases considerably once the weather cools down. If you haven’t already begun to take advantage of this avenue of generating traffic, you are losing potential customers. Consider hiring professional article writers who understand the intricacies of presenting original content on social media websites including Facebook and Twitter and increase your company’s profit margin.

Offer a Promotion

Offer coupons, free products, or free shipping that customers can use online or download onto their phones for redemption in your place of business.

Snail Mail Wins Every Time

While some people pooh-pooh the value of snail mail, it is affordable, convenient, and re-readable. Why not ask a freelance writer to come up with exceptional sales copy for a postcard mailing to potential customers in the area? Advertise a special discount or free gift. You never know who your recipient might pass the postcard to when they are done with it.

Posters, Billboards, Flyers, and Radio Blurbs

If it’s in your budget, come up with a few unique concepts and turn them over to experienced article writers for use on a poster, billboard, or flyer to attract new business.

Sharpen and Revitalize Content for Your Website

If you want to attract some of Internet users to your site, you should replace old text with original content for website use to revitalize your image. Tap into the exceptional skills of experienced article writers who have the magic in their fingertips to create enchanting content for websites. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but quality content is one of the most valuable assets business owners can use to generate new click-through traffic.

Using Article Writers Who Get Excited Over Your Products or Services

While most freelance writers can compose content for websites on a variety of topics, finding article writers who are enthusiastic about writing for you is the difference between a few new customers and lots of them. While original content attracts search engine spiders, you need reliable article writers to attract consumers.

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By Celeste Stewart

As most of us know, content is king. While we peddle Web content like website home pages, product descriptions, press releases, unique articles, and blog posts, we recently heard from a customer who sells a different type of content: data sets. We were fascinated with Oddity Software's approach. We recently spent some time chatting with Will, the Chief Technical Officer of Oddity Software, and learning more about database content.

CC: Both Constant-Content and Oddity Software are in the Web content business, though with different angles. Can you briefly describe your database content?

OS: Our database collection contains over five thousand different maintained data sets, and focuses on three distinct areas. The first area includes website content and utility databases for sticky SEO content. For example, these data sets include information such as recipe lists, routing numbers, game cheats, baby names, and so on.

The second area focuses on LBS (location based services) and business data. These databases contain location-specific information such as ATM locations, restaurant locations, and local bars and clubs. We also offer full state- and country-specific data sets. These are fully geocoded collections that are employed for Web apps such as Google Map-type services and directory websites. They have become increasingly important to mobile application developers.

The third category of data is tailored to marketing professionals that utilize data for snail-mail, email, and telephone/fax marketing.

CC: How do you supplement your own websites with outsourced content?

OS: For our core site, we use Constant-Content's writers for product descriptions, service explications, and even for editing of content that we have written. After all, we're geeks at heart and tend to write that way as well. So having someone to follow us up and rephrase our text for a less technical audience is very beneficial.

Beyond that, we develop many sites utilizing our own content databases. An example would be a restaurant locator website. While we have many details and sticky content in the restaurant locations database, having a writer do a review or a description of each restaurant is really what pushes the site over the edge in terms of providing that additional information to the end user, as well as from an SEO standpoint. Between the database and custom descriptions it's common to start ranking for related key phrases on page one or two in search engines within the first month of rolling a site out.

CC: You've worked with Constant-Content writers on a number of occasions. How did you go about finding a writer that met your needs?

OS: When we have a firm idea or audience in mind for the content we tend to browse writer profiles and existing articles on your site. From there, we select a content writer based on our understanding of the writer's writing style and experience with the given subject matter. And when we're stuck, given the broad range of our writing needs, we will convey our requirements to your support staff and they will identify a writer best suited for our exact needs. Based on that recommendation, we will then file the writing request.

CC: How has outsourcing content benefited your company?

OS: The largest benefit for us is diversification. Our Web ventures and data collections are vast and broad. Being able to draw from a pool of experienced writers that have expertise in different areas allows for truly tailoring content that is well written and specific to the subject matter.

But going further than that, I think that the process of outsourcing content helps us diversify our thinking in regards to our own products and services. Often, especially as it relates to say a product description, we will not give the writer a tremendous amount of direction. This allows us to see how an unbiased, undirected writer interprets our products. This gives us a fresh perspective that has helped us discover many new directions and implementations that we never thought of before.

CC: Our readers are familiar with purchasing content such as unique articles, product descriptions, and blog posts, but they may not be as well acquainted with using content from databases. Can you tell us some of the benefits of your services?

OS: There are two main reasons that a developer or webmaster will use database content. The first being return on investment. The written content that you mentioned, such as blogs and product descriptions, are very much open to interpretation and require a unique take on a given subject. With a content list such as our music lyrics database, there is no ‘interpretation’ needed. It is a data set of transcribed lyrics and album information for 140,000 songs. Given the amount of time, energy, and cost that goes into compiling such a resource, the ROI in purchasing a pre-compiled database with this information is a huge benefit. The work has already been done and you can start integrating the data into a website right away.

But the biggest benefit is often just sheer volume. Let’s say you have an affiliate website about dentistry. That site probably has articles and blog posts that provide plenty of keyword-rich spider food and valuable user content. If you write one blog post each week for a year, you have 52 pages of content that can be crawled by the search engines. Now if you add a database directory of dentist locations to your site, not only are you giving your users a nice resource and a reason for them to return, you can literally add hundreds of thousands of new pages to your site that can be indexed by search engines. This has the potential to give you millions of different key phrase combinations that can bring new traffic to your site. Pair that with written descriptions from Constant-Content's writers and those millions of pages can start ranking very high.

The brilliance of having those listings in a database means you can simply create a couple of PHP files that interface with the data to generate the output. This can cut the development time for creating all of those pages down to just a day or two.

Constant-Content would like to thank Will from Oddity Software for sharing these insights and strategies with us.

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If your visitors don’t know they are in the right place, they aren’t going to hang around and click through to other pages. So, you need to show them right away that they are indeed in the right place with your presentation of “killer content”, written with them in mind. It is also important to realize that exceptional Web page content is written specifically for the Web as opposed to print publication.

What is killer web page content? While quite a few definitions exist for the phrase “killer content,” many of them agree that it is informative, compelling, and unique. In essence, killer content is the opposite of filler content. It offers quality information that site visitors want to read.

Since good quality content is written for your audience rather than at them, your content engages your visitors with the message rather than annoying them with the lack of a message. Through killer content, you provide exactly what your target audience is looking to find or needs to find. In some cases, killer content may not be exactly what your targeted audience is looking for, but it is so compelling and provides such a unique slant on the topic that your website visitors keep reading and coming back for more.

1) Gives Your Site Credibility

Your presentation of content needs to portray a sense of expertise and trustworthiness in order to create strongly perceived web credibility. The quality of your content provides this credibility with its factual presentation and the validity of the information it contains.

You want your readers to be able to believe what is written on your site. Therefore, the content must be seen as having been written by a knowledgeable individual in order to promote the value of visiting your website. Due to the huge amount of information currently available on the Web, a site with content that offers a positive credibility image draws a greater number of visitors, increases conversions, and raises page ranking.

2) Engages Your Visitors and Keeps Them on the Site

Composing content that focuses on your targeted audience or ideal customer keeps them engaged and clicking through additional pages on your website. Engaging content encourages your visitors to click through multiple pages and has them wanting to come back again for more. If there’s nothing worthwhile to read, your visitors are going to leave within seconds of landing on a webpage.

3) Encourages Visitors to Share Your Site with Their Friends

A website that features killer content is going to attract new visitors simply because it leads to word-of-mouth sharing. If your website consistently offers good content that is worthwhile to read, your visitors are going to share that information. Whether your visitors tell one person or they tell many about the benefits of visiting your website, the overall effect is to increase traffic to your site. This is one kind of chain reaction that you want to encourage – people praising your website and the value of visiting it one after the other.

4) Improves Search Rankings Naturally if You Write About Areas Your Business Is Focused in

Improving your search engine ranking is the best way to get your site noticed, while drawing more traffic to it. Including quality content on your website is one of the techniques that you can use to enhance your ranking naturally. Writing about areas that your business is focused in drives the right kind of traffic to your website – the kind that stays awhile clicking through to additional pages of content. All of this improves the chances of your website appearing on the first page of search engine results – the page that the majority of people actually look at when searching for a particular topic or product. It also increases the quality of the interaction with an increase in page views per visitor.

5) Powers Your Social Media Efforts with Content That Is Reusable on Most Social Media Platforms and Drives People Back to Your Site

While you are building your reputation with timely and up-to-date content, you increase the number of unique visitors, returning visitors, enquiring visitors. Not only do people know that you offer killer content, but they also know that the content is available there when they need it. Both of these factors is going to drive more people to your site as your content appears all over the Internet via social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Plus One, Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon. If you know how people are searching, then you can figure out how they are thinking, tailoring your content to attract new and repeat visitors, especially via social media platforms.

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