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Launch Your Own Website – Part Seven: Creating Your Site Content

Written by kevin

Welcome to Part Seven of my article series entitled “Launch Your Own Website” based on my practical experience in launching my own site.

The series will also be made available later in PDF form as a FREE download for all readers of BreakingOut.NET.

In Part Seven I explain how to create the content for your new website. Good content is the basis of all successful websites. As the saying goes “Content is King”. So let’s get started…

Once you’ve researched and identified a niche, registered a domain name and set up your blog, you’ll then be ready to start creating the content for your site.

Don’t worry too much about getting everything perfect straight away. Websites are actually never perfect or completed despite what anyone says.

There’s always something more to do, something to add, something to change, something to improve. You can always revise and move things around and refine it all later on. Websites are always a “work in progress”. The most important thing is to get started creating the content for your site.

Create your Post Categories using your Keywords

First you need to set up your Post Categories in the WordPress Dashboard.

These are the topic areas under which your Posts will be grouped. You can always change the Categories and add more later. You can also move a Post from one Category to another.

You should give some thought to the structure and names of your Categories. First of all, don’t have too many. Secondly, make sure they are relevant to your audience. You should aim to utilize the keywords that are relevant to your niche as the names of your Categories. In this way, your website’s structure will mean more to your audience. It will also help you attract more visitors to your site via the search engines.

You can also arrange your Categories so that you have sub-Categories nested below them. This can help keep your site menu looking simple and it helps with site navigation. It’s probably best though not to create a further nest of sub-Categories within a sub-Category. Things can get too complicated for your visitors if you start doing this. Always ask yourself: is my site navigation easy to follow for my visitors? Does it make sense to them? Your visitors should not have to second-guess where to find things on your site.

Write your Posts and Pages

Once you’ve set up your Categories, you can write your Posts and Pages. What’s the difference between Posts and Pages?

For “dynamic content”, where you’ll frequently be adding new articles, you use Posts.

For more static content that doesn’t change over time and where you aren’t going to be adding more articles, such as your “About Me,” “Contact Details,” or “Copyright” texts, you use Pages.

Use interesting, lively or humorous titles for your Posts. A good way is to use a “teaser” type title for a Post, such as a question like “Want To Know How To….”, or “How to…”. Remember the “W” questions: Why, When, Where, What. These are excellent ways to create a title.

People always find lists interesting to read – but don’t make them too long. Seven, ten or twelve items are good lengths to keep to. For example “Seven Ways To Save Money on…”,or “Ten Ways To Improve Your…”.

It’s also a good general rule not to make your posts too long. Opinions vary and it also depends on what you are writing about, but as a general rule of thumb it’s probably best to write posts with a length of between around 500 and 750 words maximum.

Not everyone finds it easy to write. Some people, such as myself enjoy writing and this makes it much easier. For others, particularly those not used to writing or those for whom it brings back memories of school when you had to sit before a blank sheet of paper to write an english comprehension or essay exercise in one hour it can seem like horror.

Even professional writers and those who enjoy writing can suffer occasional “writer’s block”. There are many suggestions as to how to combat this.

Some tips on how to write great content

Basically, you need ideas and enthusiasm in order to write. So how do you get ideas? And how do you create enthusiasm?

TIP! Before you start writing, read some articles already written by other people in your subject niche.

This will help to give you ideas. You can even cut and paste some of it and rework it to get started. But don’t ever copy and reproduce text written by others as that is copyright violation.

TIP! When you’re are starting out writing, only write for 10 minutes at a time.

The following advice about creative writing is based on a method I learned from Ed Dale’s Challenge course.

First, set a timer for 10 minutes. Open Google Docs, or WordPad on your computer. WordPad is ideal for making notes and writing content locally on your PC/laptop. But try to get in the habit of working with Google Docs because this makes life much easier. I prefer these two utilities to using the old “big iron” software like MS-Word or Open Office. These take far too long to load and they gobble up all or most of the memory and lead to RAM/hard drive swapping which slows the computer down.

Then just start writing about some aspect of your niche subject. Don’t criticise it, dont even worry about spelling and grammar – and don’t try to edit it. Just write.

You don’t even have to write full proper sentences, you can just put down whatever points occur to you. Or just brief notes or rough text.

Just write for 10 minutes and then stop. Don’t try to tidy it up or edit it straight away. Just save it and leave it to sit until the next day. And then go away and do something else.

TIP! To create the best quality content, draft and edit your text at different times!

Never try to write your draft, edit and complete it in the same session. Keep these tasks separate with a break in between. Preferably a full day between.

On the next day, take a look at your piece of writing again. Add to it, modify and improve it. Add a small number of your relevant subject niche keywords to the post – but don’t go mad. Don’t overdo it or try to “keyword stuff” your post. It doesn’t fool the search engines nowadays and it just reads bad and looks cheap to your human audience. Save your piece of writing again.

Giving your post a final edit

Later in the day or the next day, give your piece a final edit and polish. Also run it through the spell checker. Don’t forget to read it through yourself – slowly and carefully – in order to catch the “syntactical errors”. These are errors that the spell check functions can’t identify. Only human readers can recognize them.

This means things like sentences that don’t make sense, even though all the words in the sentence are spelled correctly. Writing for example, “witch” instead of “which”, “too” when you really meant “two” and so on. This is also a reason why you need to give yourself a break from your own writing after drafting and before you give it the final edit – it lets you look at your work with fresh eyes.

You can then copy and paste your article from Google Docs or WordPad to your WordPress Dashboard, using the Posts → Add Post facility.

You don’t have to publish your post right away. WordPress provides a useful content Scheduler facility which enables you to set the publishing date and even time exactly as you wish. If your post is still not completed, you can set it to “Draft” for the time being and go back to working on it later whilst it’s already in WordPress. Just make sure if you post isn’t yet finished that you don’t forget to set the post’s status to “Draft”.

In fact, it’s actually best not to publish all your content in one go or on the one day. Spread it out over different days. Initially of course you will want to get all your “anchor content’ and important basic information written and online quickly. But after that you can slow down.

Staggering the scheduling and publishing or your posts in this way also works better with the search engines and helps you build up more “organic traffic”.

You should try to post at the very least once a week and preferably at least 2 or 3 times a week. These don’t necessarily have to be long posts, but they should be quality posts which say something or provide information worth reading for your audience.

It can take some days and weeks to find your true “voice” in your writing style. Don’t worry about it – just keep at it, keep going – and your writing will gradually improve.

Quality not quantity!

When it comes to site content, you should always concentrate on producing quality rather than quality. The content of your blog is what will attract visitors to your site. Always bear your audience in mind and put them first.

Over time, the content of your site will build up almost by itself. Good quality post and pages that people really want to read always win out over poor quality content that is quickly thrown together. Having high quality content – which includes how useful it is to your audience, will be the most important asset of your site.

The great thing with building a blog is that your efforts are cumulative over time. None of your posts are ever lost. Even those which are “buried” in your monthly archives can be republished, or modified or re-featured. So you’ll also be building up a valuable source of your own unique site content as you go that you can draw on again and again later in the future.

Don’t worry if it takes you a little time to find your true “voice” online. This is normal. Just aim to always communicate naturally with your audience. So much of the mainstream media is false and contrived. So being honest and sincere – even if it’s sometimes a little rough and ready, is always appreciated by people.

This is in fact the great advantage you have as a blogger over big business and the large conventional old media institutions. Big corporations rely on putting up a pseudo front with plastic PR and multi-million dollar promotions. You on the other hand will be trading on good old ground-level honesty. And that’s what people like and it’s what’s missing in much of media and business these days.

The amazing thing is that with a little effort, it’s possible for you as a blogger to achieve better results than the big corporates can – and for practically nothing.

So good luck and have fun with creating your site content!