Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The 2 Most Valuable Things for Monetizing a Web Site

I notice two consistently recurring themes whenever I do research on ways to improve my online income. When I see them, it reminds me to stop ... clear my mind ... and ask myself, "Is the work I'm doing right now improving one of two things."

"What are those things?", you might ask.

  1. adding valuable content that will give visitors to my site what they're searching for
  2. building inbound links to pages on my site from highly ranked pages on sites trusted by the search engines
When I distill it down, these fundamentals are at the root of what makes money for me. Yes, I feel the tug of a thousand different to do's I need to get done as I build my online business. At times, all this stuff to do seems overwhelming for me. I find myself getting distracted and spinning my wheels. When that happens, I stop ... clear my mind (and my desk) ... and decide to do two things immediately: write some content and build an inbound link.

Invariably, this does the trick to calm me down, refocus my mind and energy, and gets me producing work that makes me money. I love this business!

Monday, October 02, 2006

Content is King!!!

The two most sought after things on the web.



A thousand times I've heard it said, "Content is King!!!". I agree to a large extent. However, I like to modify this mantra for my personal use, "Unique and valuable content is KING!" So what makes valuable content. To me value lies in giving people what they want. What do they want when they use the search engines? In general, they want one of two things:
  1. a quick and clear answer to a particular question they have
  2. some form of entertainment
Of course, content comes is an infinite number of forms. But I've found that, when I keep these two basic human desires in mind, I usually write content that has value in the eyes of my readers. And that's what really counts.