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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The World Wide Web has changed the way we do business. Where it was once enough to have a website, today's savvy business owners are harnessing the power of the Web by doing Public Relations (PR) online, connecting with customers, and building lists of subscribers.

Doing PR Online with Press Releases

Online PR allows you to: spread the word about your business, drive traffic to your website, and give your website an SEO boost thanks to the backlinks coming from high PageRank sites. Yes, the humble press release can do all of this!

Sites such as PRWeb.com, eReleases.com, and PRNewswire.com allow you to upload and distribute press releases to the masses. It's not unusual for press releases to be picked up by news distribution channels like Google News. Not only can you quickly spread the word about your business's latest news, you'll build valuable backlinks from authority websites.

You'll need compelling content for your press releases. Check out Constant Content's new pool of press release writers and have your press releases quickly and professionally written by online press release writing professionals.

Connecting with Customers with Social Networking

While the Web is now 20 years old, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are mere babies. It's not too late to get on the social networking bandwagon. Share your press releases, tips, fun facts, discounts, and other interesting tidbits with your customers and start interacting. It's fun, rewarding, and traffic-generating.

Continuing to Connect with Opt-in Lists

Newsletters may seem old-fashioned compared to social networking, but they remain one of the best ways to build relationships and stay in touch with your customers. First-time visitors to your website may never return, despite their good intentions. However, if you can get those visitors to sign up for your newsletter, you can continue to communicate and prompt them to visit your site time and time again.

Again, you'll need compelling content. In this case, you'll need content such as a free special report or eBook to entice visitors to subscribe as well as content for your future newsletters. Constant-Content is ready to serve once again with thousands of qualified writers skilled in writing everything from unique articles and blog posts to sales copy, white papers, and eBooks.

If you've been thinking of doing online PR, now's the perfect time to get started and begin reaping the benefits of increased traffic. Order a press release, article, white paper, or eBook today!

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One excellent way to promote your blog is through guest posting on other blogs. This has two benefits. The first is that it drives traffic to your blog from the other blog, providing a temporary boast in traffic. The second is that it creates a quality backlink to your blog from another relevant source. This gives search engines a better indication of what your blog is about and also tells the search engines that your blog is a trusted source of information.

Making Contact

Of course, before you can guest post you need to find a blog which will accept your posts. Simply using a search engine is a good place to start. Google your niche and browser through the first few pages of results. Send out an email to the the owner or editor of each blog letting them know you're interested in guest posting. Be polite, be concise, and make absolutely sure that your email is grammatically correct. Don't expect a response from every blog you contact, but a few should get back to you.

You can also benefit from thinking outside the box when contacting blogs. For example, let's say you have a blog about cell phones. Contacting other cell phone blogs is a no-brainer, but what about contacting blogs about cars? Many cars now communicate with cell phones, but automotive writers don't always know a lot about the subject and would be happy to have content written by an expert on the subject. This is just one example, of course. There are many ways in which creative thinking can result in surprising alliances.

Making the Post

Once you've reached an agreement with a blog for a guest post you need to actually write the post. Generally speaking, your guest post should be a substantial and informative piece of content, not a simple news post.

How-to articles are always a good bet because they provide useful, concise information which positions your blog as a place to visit for practical information. They also position you as an expert and let readers know that your information is trustworthy. General technical articles or in-depth commentary on a recent news item can also achieve this.

Avoid “rant” posts. These posts are not a bad idea on your own blog because, if well written, they can give your blog character. However, this guest post is your introduction to an audience. They don't know you, and don't trust you, and so they probably won't be receptive to a post which rocks the boat too much.

Bringing in the Traffic

Even an excellent guest post will not bring in traffic if it was not properly credited. Ideally there should be a header to your post which states that your post is a guest post and includes your name and a link to your website. Try to negotiate this before writing your post. A guest post won't be of much use to you if you are only credited by a sentence in small font at the bottom of the post.

If possible, try to work in a link to one of your own articles in the text of the blog post of all. You should of course discuss this with the blog you are writing the guest post for. These links make excellent backlinks and readers are likely to click on them during the course of reading the post.

Keep it Up

These are the basics of guest posting, but don't be satisfied once you have accomplished your first guest post. Keep it up. Find new blogs to post on and continue to guest post for blogs which you have worked with before. This will give you many quality backlinks and will boost your rankings in search engines over time.

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Efficiency is a beautiful thing. Squeezing the most traffic out of an article that you purchase through Constant-Content is of interest to all our publishers.  But when it comes to search rankings, one page can only do so much. Here are a few tips that we want to share from some experts on SEO. Hopefully they will help you eek the most out of your content purchases.  This is part #1 of our Plan and Publish series, stay tuned for the next installment!

 

One Page, One Keyword Idea

Though perhaps a little basic, try this: Decide that your goal for each page is to gain a ranking for one keyword idea, which boils down to 2 or 3 tightly focused keyword phrases. When you are building links to a page, both internal and external links,  and know exactly which phrases you're targeting for the page, the result is an clear vision that makes it easier to complete the necessary work. This focus makes creating a bookmark for the page in Delicious, or fashioning a tweet to get the news about your new page into the Internet’s collective consciousness, intuitive. By no means is this a call to stuff repeated keywords into each page, but having the target keyword phrase (or phrases) in mind can help keep the desired outcome of the page more clearly defined - and search engines appreciate clarity.

Some people argue that one keyword phrase is a good place to start. Others argue that restricting yourself to a single keyword phrase will lead to unnatural writing (see the comments at the other end of this link), and because that writing isn't enjoyable to read, it will cause prospective customers to bounce from the site. As is often the case, the best policy is to find a compromise between the two ideas. Keep each page tightly focused around one particular keyword idea while you maintain a natural and easily readable content-writing style.

 

Tight Focus Simplifies Promoting and Optimizing Content

When your pages are tightly focused in their goals, the actions required to promote and optimize the page become less daunting.  If you can create a site map that outlines every page that your site has (or you plan to add) and list the keyword idea for that page and the 2-3 keyword phrases that you're targeting, you've created a firm understanding of what the goals are for each page.  While the search engines may send your visitors from any number of keyword phrases, having a solidified plan for what you're aiming to rank for is putting the foundation in place to build your organic search marketing upon.

Looking at this from another angle: If you know what keyword phrases you hope to rank for, lining up the writing projects becomes easier. Have you been trying to rank for too many keywords on the same page? We can help with that. Log in, submit a request for custom content and purchase articles you need to start ranking for some of your keywords ideas.

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