How to Turn Your Content Into an Income Stream
- Image of Article Writing
Guest post by Corry Cummings
Content is the undisputed king of the Internet. Nothing drives traffic to a web site and increases profits like a well written piece of content. However, it’s not all good news. Content is difficult to write. Even if you have a great deal of experience as a writer, not having experience as an Internet writer can make even the best technically written content relatively worthless. You spend a lot of time creating content that is valuable to your readers. Now it’s time for them to start giving back. You need to learn how to turn your content into an income stream. This assumes that you are providing an article that is valuable to your readers and well written but are not seeing profits.
The King’s Crown – Search Engine Optimization
If you plan on doing any article writing on the Internet and are not familiar with search engine optimization, you need to learn it’s basics as quickly as possible. Even if you are not writing to pay the bills, ignoring search engine optimization is like publishing a book to be distributed on the moon. No one will be able to find your content and your efforts will be in vain. Provided here are some tips to optimize any piece of content:
Write each article based on a keyword phrase (finding good dog collars, where to find Asian food in Seattle, etc.) Make sure that your phrase appears as close to the beginning and end as possible and in most paragraphs in your article. Good keyword density is around 2% (keyword phrase word count compared to total word count).
Don’t get too fancy. One little known consideration in search engine optimization is the text to code ratio. Most writing for the Internet uses html codes to determine how the content will look when it appears online. For example “<p>” will be used to mark the beginning of a paragraph. However, if an article begins to use too many special alterations like bold, italics or color, the html code can start to overwhelm the actual text from a search engine point of view. Try to keep your html codes simple.
SEO Beyond Your Content
Search engine optimization often goes far beyond the actual piece of content. In order to be sure that your content has the potential to become an income stream, you need to be sure that you actively promote it through back links. Although not the only method, back links are arguably one of the most valuable techniques when compared to the ease of their creation and relative cost. You can promote your content by finding related web sites or blogs and asking if they would either be open to exchanging links or accepting a free guest post in exchange for a link to your content or web site.
With a few exceptions, turning content into profit is not an easy task. You will need a great deal of patience. It would be nice if, once you were done drafting the actual content, your job was done. However, never lose hope. You know that your service or information is valuable. With hard work, so will your readers. Learning how to turn your content into an income stream is an ongoing process. But fear not, your hard work will likely pay off in the end earning you the holy grail phrase of Internet marketing – passive income.
Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, a content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services. He also runs a blog over at Content Customs, which is managed and written by one of the head writers of the company.
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About The Blog Author
Alex Sysoef is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer and ProBlogger who shares his passion and knowledge of WordPress, SEO, Social Media and traffic strategies on his blog WordPress Howto Spotter. Connect on Twitter or Facebook
12 Responses to “How to Turn Your Content Into an Income Stream”
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How to Turn Your Content Into an Income Stream: Learning how to turn your content into an income stream is an ongo… http://bit.ly/deg5gO
SEO for content, or “per post’ is where I fall flat. I just don’t understand the mechanics behind KW research…the numbers and such.
Dennis Edell recently posted..Sub Categories and Drop Down Menus – What’s the Deal?
You have written a great point here. Ranking is depend mostly on backlinks and it takes time to get quality backlinks. But a the same time we can rank well by including LSI keywords in our content.
Chandan recently posted..How I Ranked in First Page of Google Within 48 Hours
Great post, Corry! In our coaching we teach people to turn those solid informative posts into podcasts and videos as well, as repurposing the content that way helps tobring backlinks from the podcast &video directories, getting more juice for each creative post. Hope to see more from you here at Alex’s!
Doug Champigny recently posted..Start Affiliate Marketing Home
No offense, but the post title has nothing to do with your content. Bit of a no no. If you are going to optimize content, it should be relevant. Here you have a title saying it’s going to tell you how to monetize your content, but instead it simply tells you to learn how to optimize your content for search engines. Most folks don’t even understand how search engines look at key words, much less how to figure out which ones to use.
A great phrase repeated at a 2% density is going to do nothing for you if that phrase is in competition with 20 million others using it.
Food for thought.
Paul Novak recently posted..Bear With Me
Good point Paul,
This is a guest post and not my own content and I just shared it as was.
Thanks. Yeah, I saw it was a guest post. I figured he’d be following responses. His advice is sound, just a bit unfocused is all. It IS necessary to have your content optimized if you want it to make money, no doubt about it. It just kind of jarred me because I expected from the title to see something about securing sponsors or perhaps how to effectively utilize affiliate programs.
I’m confused as it is trying to keep up with how fast things change online. If it weren’t for my GF I doubt I could even find my socks in the morning;)
Paul Novak recently posted..Bear With Me
I suppose it is possible to turn content into an income stream over time even if you do not understand keyword research. If you produce compelling stuff that causes people to subscribe to your feed/newsletter then you will build traffic over time. A site with a lot of incoming links will tend to rank for terms that you never even considered when you were writing the content (just look at the Google Analytics keyword report on an established site for confirmation of this).
Neil recently posted..My 4 Priorities For a Happy Life
I personally feel that nothing can beat the content/information provided by anyone in terms of rankings and traffic both. I have personally seen that many people don’t go for SEO at all for their websites as their website content and design are superb.
The thing that is quite a shame is the loss of great headlines. With everyone having to write content for the search engines, I find myself missing really creative titles that make me want to read articles.
Jim recently posted..Top Ten Search Engines
Hey Corry, just wondering, would you consider too many special alterations like bold, italics or color?
You talk about “Good keyword density is around 2% … ” Many guys in SEO say we shouldn’t really look at KW density any more, so i take it you think otherwise… also if you do look at KW density i think it changes by the subject you are targeting and the keyword… each industry is different, dont you think so ?
David Miles recently posted..Getting Back In The eBay Game