Writing great content is the key to having your website/blog stand out and attract readers. Content is key – without it, your website is just a template. So many bloggers and webmasters try to get away with writing sub-par content.

This content might be hastily written ramblings stuffed with keywords just to provide some kind of meat to a website and make it attractive to the search engines. Often, software is used to “spin” existing content to make it unique. Usually these articles are confusing and unreadable to an actual human visitor.

Many people try to outsource their content as cheap as possible to writers in India or the Phillipines – while this works okay in some cases, most of time you get what you pay for. These kinds of writers do not always know proper English, and as a result their articles are full of spelling and grammatical errors.

If your website/blog exists solely for backlink juice, this might be all right. But if your goal is to attract and engage an active readership you must be willing to put in the time and effort to produce great, interesting content.

Here are some basic tips and tricks for doing just that!

• Find out the hot topics and talk about them. Try to find an ‘angle’ that other writers have not covered and be the first to provide information / opinions on it.

• Be controversial. Voice an opinion that arouses intrigue and fiery debate. Ask provocative questions and encourage your readers to comment their thoughts and opinions. For example: “Marketers who promote CPA are just glorified spammers! Can CPA and ‘ethics’ be mentioned in the same sentence?” You’ll find that you’ll get a lot of responses and your post may even be featured on forums or other areas where you’ll get tons of traffic.

• Always provide many line breaks in your writing. This will make your blog post easily digestible. Huge blocks of text are difficult to read and readers will have the natural inclination to overlook the content and click off the page to find something easier to read.

• Content doesn’t always have be in written format. Spice up your blog with occasional photographs, videos, and podcasts.

• Read lots of blogs in both your niche and others. Find out what makes the popular blogs so interesting and fun to read, and apply your findings to your own blog.

• Don’t be self-conscious about your writing! So many people have extremely low confidence in their own ability to write. Don’t even think about it. Sure, you might not be the next Shakespeare, but if you write from the heart and genuinely commit to providing your readers with useful information, you’ll do a great job.

That’s it for now. Start using these tips today to provide great content and attract tons of readers!

The first step in making money online is finding a niche to market to. This can be anything, I recommend you choose something passionate to you so you don’t mind writing and reading about it daily. Once you have your niche you start building a keyword list. A keyword describes your content. Keywords are used by the search engines to decide where to place your content/website in the search engine rankings. It’s best to choose keywords intentionally, rather than have the search engine choose them for you. So if you’re in the weight loss niche, You’re going to want to generate related keywords such as how to lose weight, lose weight quickly, buy diet pills, akins diet etc. There are some decent tools for doing keyword research a good free one is freekeywords.wordtracker.com. I recommend you generate 5 top goal keywords, these are the keywords you want to be number one on. These will be the first 5 pages for your website!

The website can be a blog, or any other CMS if you prefer. You could use 5 static pages as your main keywords/navigation, and attach a blog to grab long-tail keywords with your posts! Once you have your website up and running it’s on. Start by writing the 5 pages we discussed as your main navigation/landing pages. These can be the wordpress pages. Then write a few good articles related to your niche and submit these to your blog. Don’t forget to ping each time you post an article, use a service such as pingomatic.com

Once you have your website up and you’re posting articles atleast 4 days out of the week, you’re going to want to start building links. I recommend you take 5 articles each week, and on random days you post 1 article to 1 article directory. Use top article directories for the best success. Be sure not to use articles that are on your blog. You want to use unique articles for the article directories, this is where most people mess up by mass posting articles. If you post one quality article to eZineArticles, You can set the title as a long tail keyword and generate an extra 20 or so visits per day with just one article! This builds up quick. Also you leave a link to your blog in the promotion box, this generates a link for your site and pushes it up in rankings.

I like to use SEO, it is a long-term source of traffic. It doesn’t require as much attention as Pay per click campaigns and other traffic sources. I find it also converts the best! So all-in-all it seems to make sense to start projects with Search engine optimization, and move up from there. Using the technique outlined above I have generated mini-sites that get 500-600 visits per day. I recommend you outsource the writing once you start scaling it up to new niches.