2005 January | Content Blog

What is Web Content?

Jan 06, 2005 No Comments »

I think everything that appears on a web page is content — this includes text, graphics and even flash animation. Since only deal with textual content, my stress is greater on this subject, and in fact, the most important content on any web page is the textual content. Generally, a picture can say more than the words, it’s your words that really convey your message to your website visitors.

The Internet has passed its juvenile stage. Gone are the days when people wanted the coolest websites with tens of thousands of hits per day. They thought all these hits will one day automatically metamorphose into cash profits. Sadly, this didn’t happen. A major factor was the lack of good, relevant, credible content. There was more noise, less meaning. The so-called experts earned thousands of dollars helping people set online shops that went bust within months.

What they should have done was, have good content on the websites. But what’s good content? Good web content is content that conveys your message exactly the way it should be conveyed without engaging in rhetoric and misleading expressions. When your user visits your website, your content should represent you…it should be as if you are talking to the visitor.

Posted by Amrit | Tags: General

Advertising on Blogs

Jan 05, 2005 No Comments »

The mainstream advertising is gradually realizing the importance of blogs as promotional tools. A big chunk of Internet traffic these days centers around millions of blogs churned out on a daily basis. Although 99% of such blogs carry no business relevance (or any other relevance, for that matter).

According to a recent report published at ClickZ, BURST! Media launched Blog Ad Channel. The service, according to ClickZ, allows interactive marketers to place ads on the more than 20 blogs on BURST!’s 2,000-site network. They have already landed Kyocera Wireless as its first advertising customer. The report further states that BURST! currently represents 22 blogs that together generate 9 million monthly page views. Now this is a big number.

This also bodes good for serious blog publishers who have till now been publishing quality stuff without considering (or getting) the business aspects. If they don’t get paid for the content, they can get paid for the advertising.

Posted by Amrit | Tags: General

Pay per click programs

Jan 04, 2005 No Comments »

I feel if one has to compare the pay per click programs (PPCs) AdWords is much better than Overture because on Overture the ranking depends on how much one bids. On AdWords it is different — you can improve your ranking by increasing the performance of your ad copy.

A while ago I wrote an article on how to improve the Adwords copy and reduce the cost of your pay per click campaign. Since I got paid for the article, I cannot publish it for free, but some day I’m going to “improve” it and publish it on my website. Basically what you have to do it, create campaign so that more and more people click on your link. This way you get a higher click-through ratio. The higher is your click through ratio, the lower you have to pay per click.

This means the performance of your ad campaign does not depend on the amount you bid (to some extent, yes it does depend initially). So if a company can afford to spend $5 per click and I can afford only $1 per click for the same service but people click more on my advertisements, I get a higher ranking compared to the company that pays $5.

Posted by Amrit | Tags: General

Happy New Year

Jan 01, 2005 No Comments »

I never make the New Year resolutions because I don’t believe in them. I believe every day is the beginning of a new year, and in fact, every day is as important as the first day of the calendar new year. But just for the sake of discussion and from the business point of view there are a few observations regarding the previous year that I would like to share.

The year was a mixed bag of good and bad things…in fact many good things and a few bad things. I had wanted to work a lot more but I couldn’t. I’d blame it on a few silly decisions on my part. I should have been into content writing from the beginning but I kept doing everything under the sun but content writing. Some web development projects fell upon me like self-invited imprecations. I say “self-invited” because it was I who went out of my way to get those projects and was ecstatic when I got them, never, never learning from my previous experiences. As was expected, I ended up spending on them rather than earning from them, not to mention all those months that I wasted on them. They were all low-budgeted projects and it has now been proven beyond doubt that low paying clients are great blood-suckers. If they can, they will consume every ounce of your effort keeping back as much money as possible.

Then one day I re-launched www.amrithallan.com. A lot of credit goes to my wife Alka, who repeated asserted that my career was in writing, not in designing silly logos for client who didn’t even know what they wanted. I redesigned www.amrithallan.com, I advertised it, and I promoted it with all my effort. This gave a positive result. The amount of business that it generated in two months exceeded the amount of business it had generated in the past two years. It proved to me that people were eager to pay for what I wrote. I wrote optimized website content, I wrote sales copies, I wrote essays and articles, and I wrote product reviews. This also gave me a direction and helped me re-orient myself.

Content writing is a specialized field. Not everybody can do that. You cannot have a tool for it, and you cannot steal the code and you cannot copy the design. Every individual word matters, and if you can write well, and can deliver on or before time, there is always going to be plenty of work for you. And this is going to be my focus for the coming year. I’ll be doing the following to increase my personal as well as business skills: