Write your
own content
In the early stages of your site, I
highly recommend you write your own content. Doing so forces you to
understand your subject matter better. It forces you to understand who
your customers are and what they're looking for. It gives you the opportunity
to develop a tone, voice and style for your site. Having that understanding
will benefit your site as it matures tremendously. It will also allow you to
connect with your sites users in a way that large sites can't.
Believe
in your content
Don't write anything you don't
believe in. If you don't believe what you're pitching, your visitors won't
either. Write as if you're trying to convince yourself. Be authentic.
Write
unique content
Simply looking at what content is
ranking in your vertical and trying to copy it won't get you very far. Google
has already given that top-ranked content a place, why should it displace it
with yours, especially if the other site has more authority? Come up with
something unique and different. Originality will interest your readers, and, as
a result, will interest Google.
Borrow
from the best - in a different vertical
Large sites have huge budgets to
test for things like user experience, conversion, retention and engagement. To
avoid looking like a me-too competitor, take a look at what leading sites are
doing in other verticals, or other countries.
Measure
your content's success
So how do you know if you're
creating good content? Use Google Analytics and check to see how long people
are staying on the page you're measuring. I tried to have an average time on
page of 2 minutes for an article. If the page received less, I'd redo my
content over and over again until it received an average of 2 minutes or
higher. I found this the best process to constantly improve my content, keep it
fresh and ensure readers liked what they were reading.
Test,
test, test
Try lots of new approaches until you
land on one that works. Try writing on different topics, in different styles,
using different formats, with different images. See which ones end up with
higher average times on page, shares, links and rankings. When I started my
first site, I thought my users would want every tool possible to discover the
optimal credit card or loan for their individual need. After three years I
randomly wrote a "Best of" article, with my top picks. Traffic
exploded. It turned out most readers didn't want to be given the tools to do
their own research, they just wanted to be told what to do.
