¿Si el contenido es el rey, cómo generar suficiente contenido para mi Blog?

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I like to use my time and the space Yaro gives me here at Entrepreneurs-Journey to base my articles on questions I often receive and this one will be no different as I am going to discuss how “Mitch’s Blog” became a company with 18 current writers.

While the building a company part I have talked about in the past and I’m sure I’ll talk about it in the future, this article is going to focus on the variety of writers on my site: who they are, how they got there, and just about everything else that people would want to know if this is an approach they are thinking about.

Since this is a huge topic, I’ll break it down the best I can, and of course if you have questions, fire away in the comment section; as usual I’ll do my best to respond to all of them.

This was one of the odd things for me because at first I didn’t always actively look for writers, most often they have contacted me.

I have a lot of content already and I cover a lot sports, which appeal to a broad segment of the global population. There are literally thousands of people who would love the opportunity to write and have their work read. I get at least ten emails per week from people asking to write on my site regarding a variety of sports and the bulk I turn away (I’ll talk about the process of who I choose in a moment), but with the pool given to me, I can find people who not only want to write, but who are also a good fit with the site and with me.

Once in a while, if I am looking for writers to beef up a particular section of the site, I’ll write a short post saying so, very directly and stating exactly what people should include in their response. While this is one that is more general, here is an example of something I have used in the past.

If you have been doing your work all along and have good traffic, enough people will read articles like this, either by happening upon them on your site or through Google, so you should be able to have at least a pool of people to work with and choose from. To be honest, I am always looking for talented and inspired writers, particularly in a sport or area we have light or no coverage of.

I don’t usually accept guest posts. I get requests from people wanting to do so, but at this point it doesn’t help my site enough to make it worthwhile. Usually the guest posts I get are loaded with links and marginally related to my site, I would rather not have them at all. We produced 800 articles last month, I don’t think having or not having someone’s one-off guest post is going to make or break us, so I would just rather not have it.

At Sports Chat Place, we only post original and unique content.

Picking who is a good fit to write on my blog isn’t an exact science and it has been a learning process, but it is something I have gotten better at over time through lessons learned.

I used to let anyone, who wanted to write on my blog, contribute. As the blog has become bigger, I no longer do this for a lot of reasons. What I have learned is that while people are enthusiastic at first to write, it usually doesn’t take long to realize it is a job and like any job everyone has good days and bad days. While some people are motivated by money and others by getting notoriety, if you truly love what you do and are passionate about what you are writing about then it makes it a lot easier to get through the bad days.

Some people are just good at writing and some people enjoy it more than others, the ideal writer is both of these. While it’s tough to find these people, they are out there, but in most cases it’s best to compromise and have some give and take with people, as long as it’s in the right areas.

Some people will throw together a hastily written article and submit it to me as a writing sample, that doesn’t really work. Some people try and talk about what great writers they are, I don’t really care much about that either. I need and will only allow people to write on my site who are passionate about what they are writing about, and as long as they can write coherently with minimal editing and need just light coaching and some pointers, I usually give them a chance.

While my writers are compensated (another topic I will discuss shortly), if a person’s first contact with me centers around compensation, they probably aren’t a good fit. A lot of my writers worked for free back when the site wasn’t making any money, they did it because they loved writing and they loved what they were writing about. Receiving a check or Paypal from me doesn’t change that at all with any of them, feel free to ask them, most don’t care about the money and getting them to give me Paypal info or a W-9 so I can pay them doesn’t rank too high on their priority list.

One thing I am leery about, which is usually a warning sign, similar to money questions or demands for money, are people who say they are “good writers”. Usually I get this from people who went to schools known for Journalism or people who maybe were told by a teacher or friend they were a good writer. While getting nice marks in school is a great thing, it doesn’t mean or make a person a good writer. Having perfect sentence structure, solid grammar, or even an editorial background for a known publication or website don’t make a person a good writer. The public decides who is a good writer and they decide who a good writer is by reading a person’s writings.

So in order for a person to truly be a good writer they need to write consistently, write passionately, and need to have a following. While it’s nice for a college professor to think someone writes well, I’ll take the guy who misspells a word here and there, uses questionable grammar at times, and writes several times a week with so much passion the world wants to read more, and thousands of people read their articles, any day of the week.

Everyone who writes at Sports Chat Place is compensated, though (believe it or not) getting them to take the money isn’t always such an easy thing.

Everyone who writes at the site has signed a contract that was written by a lawyer that clearly defines what is expected of the writer as a writer on the site and how their compensation works. No writer has ever had an issue with the contract, but I always offer to them that if they do see something they don’t like, we can possibly amend it if it works for both of us.

Without getting into too much detail, the compensation is based on the contribution to the site and the income of the site over that period. Some writers only write certain sports and those sports are only played during certain months, some writers write about multiple sports at the same time, everyone gets treated the same as they are paid based upon each of their total contribution.

Basically there is a pie and the pie is based on income. The division of the pie is based on the formula we have agreed upon and recalculated monthly. While I like paying everyone, this isn’t what makes the site a success or a failure as I couldn’t always afford to pay the writers and I still always had plenty of people to write and plenty of success.

While the number of articles over the pay period each month is the biggest consideration in dividing the writer’s compensation pool, other things like timeliness of article submission and if articles need a lot of editing are other factors that are involved. The writers can also use affiliate programs and promote those within their articles, do product reviews, etc. to earn extra income and we have separate deals that address those. Everything is up front with the writers and I, there are no surprises unless it’s me throwing them an extra payment or bonus which is known to happen.

Payments go out to the writers on the 10th of each month. Some writers prefer to be paid every other month so they receive a bigger check, it doesn’t make any difference to me. As I will say over and over again, no one writes on my site for the money alone. While some of the people like getting the money and care about it more than others, we are talking about a group of people who are over the top passionate about what they are writing about, and being able to write at a place where 400,000 people a month (and growing) read it – is something they think is pretty cool.

While it’s usually a feel-good situation, not everyone works out over the long term; it’s just part of having a business. Like any job, writers have responsibilities to the site and have parameters they need to work within. We have deadlines, as sports have starting and end times, however the shelf life of a lot of what we write about isn’t too long, therefore timing is important.

Communication is important as well and although quality is paramount, I’m also a big believer in quantity, not something most bloggers hear too often.

Before I get this question, the answer is that my writers are all over the world. I have writers in Australia, Ireland, Canada, all over the United States as well as other places. It’s global and it’s the Internet, it doesn’t matter where everyone is as long as they can communicate.

I use the most common method which is email for a lot of my communication, but it certainly doesn’t end there and on most days it doesn’t begin there either. Because of the number of games being played in a certain day, as a group we try and cover as many different games as we can without duplicating coverage of the same game. Of course there are days with a lighter schedule or more prominent games like playoffs, tournaments, and championships where we have several writers cover the same games but really those are less common.

Our current primary source of communication is Google Docs. We have a shared spreadsheet that list all of the upcoming games of the sports we cover and when a writer is about to begin an article about a particular game, they put their name next to that game on the spreadsheet so all of the other writers know that game is covered. We still get double coverage once in a while but it is very rare and really doesn’t do any harm, it just helps less than a fresh topic would.

While it sounds too simple, simple is usually best, and we also weren’t smart enough to come up with anything more complex, so it works for us. Every few days or so I update the schedules of the various sports, move things around, delete the old games that have passed, add new sports that come into season, whatever. The whole scheduling takes me about five minutes per week this way.

We also use this schedule Doc to post if we can’t write or cover any games on a particular day, this gives the other writers who cover a sport a heads up that there are some extra games if they want to cover them, or if it was a day they may have taken off, maybe it’s not the best day. It’s rare two people need the same day off, but when it happens, we usually get it covered. One thing is for certain, days off are expected, but letting everyone know that someone is taking one makes the site run a lot smoother.

I also do conference calls with the writers and try and do so every month though we miss some months. I also like to talk to each of the writers at least once a month to talk about what they are doing well, what needs work, and any ideas I have for their areas or any ideas that they have for the site. I like to stay in touch with everyone and though we are growing, it’s still important for me to do so. I use the phone, Skype, Google Chat, or whatever we need to use.

All of the writers on my site post their own content live on the site.

Because of the language in the contract they signed and because I am pretty picky about whom I bring aboard, I know there won’t be any objectionable content on the site. I also know the writers aren’t perfect, but they can edit their articles as well. If there is a larger issue, it can be sorted out in the comments or forums through interaction with the readers, or if I can edit everyone’s articles.

I don’t read everything the writers write, they know this and aren’t insulted by it nor do I worry too much about it. I do read at least a few articles each week by each writer just to make sure they are still on the right track.

Most of the headings and such are auto formatted by a system I had custom built. As far as style, every writer has their own personality, but there is a specific style of writing that works well on the internet and works well with our readership, and I have a document which hits on the key points. I also spend at least an hour before each writer starts to go over a few of the real basics as writing on the net is just a different animal than print or anything else.

As I say often, if the people who come to the site have something fresh there to read, that’s the most important thing, the other stuff is just secondary or will sort itself out over time. So far this system has worked well for me.

Mitch Wilson

In 2008 Mitch typed into Google, "How do I start a Blog?". Within three months he was receiving 3,000 unique visitors a day, within a year he was blogging full time with over 400,000 monthly visitors and 1 million monthly page views. Blogging has given him a life beyond his wildest dreams. Today Mitch is a professional blogger who has turned his hobby passion into a dream job: running his own business at the Sports Chat Place. He now wishes to give back to the blogging community by sharing what he has learned.

Una guía paso a paso sobre cómo crear un sitio Web rentable contenido de nicho

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In my first post titled, Why Leave A Six Figure Corporate Job For Internet Entrepreneurship?, I provided a brief background on who I am, what I do, why I know what I know and so forth. In my next two posts, I discussed just one of the several gigs mentioned in the initial post, which discussed how I started, grew and sold an e-commerce business for $250,000.

In this post, I will discuss how to build a profitable niche website from scratch. I love this topic because anyone can do it in any subject or niche. No matter what you are involved with today, you can easily establish a niche website to add yet another passive stream of income to your portfolio and further diversify your risk across several income baskets. I hope you find it helpful in your own entrepreneur’s journey.

Niche content sites, as I call them, are static websites that are rich in content that are well optimized so that they attract heavy natural or organic search engine traffic for free. The traffic is then converted into revenue through several possible monetization methods.

Niche websites are targeted, or focused on one particular subject matter, often that in which the author has experience, expertise, knowledge or interest in learning and developing.

The business model is simple. Build a website that has a ton of quality content, optimize it well, and implement several monetization methods that you can financially benefit from. What are those methods?

I don’t intend to go into detail on each possible monetization method. I will do this in a later post in a more practical manner. As a brief overview however, consider the following few ways to make money from a niche content website once it is developed and attracting a decent level of recurring traffic:

Contextual advertisements such as Kontera, Chitika and Google Adsense Private advertisements by advertising other vendors / businessesReferral or lead generation – you pass on qualified visitors to your business partnersAffiliate marketing – you promote products and services owned by othersSales of digital products such as eBooks, DVDs and audioAutomated memberships / subscriptions through a newsletter or password protected area

This is not a comprehensive list by any means, rather some introductory ideas on how you can potentially monetize (or make money from) a website or blog.

It doesn’t take much to create a niche content website. Some of your time and a couple hundred bucks (over estimate) will usually get you there.
To be successful however, you must take your time and conduct the necessary due diligence up-front when selecting a topic or niche. This initial step often makes or breaks people who attempt to make money from this business model.

Why? Because many new entrepreneurs want to jump into the game quickly, often wanting to sell what they think is the best thing on earth. They may be passionate about the topic they have in mind, but they often forget that in order to be successful selling something (in this case information), you need to sell what the market wants and demands, NOT what YOU want to sell.

With that said, a good topic with market demand, your willingness to invest your time and a handful of online tools such as a domain name (URL), a hosting package where you host your website for the world to see, and a website building platform (such as WordPress or Adobe Dreamweaver) are sufficient to get started.

There are some turn-key solutions available today that I discuss heavily on my blog which have dropped all barriers to entry. A 16 or a 60 year old can get online just as easily and have a website up in a jiffy. Absolutely no HTML or programming skills are required, although learning the basics can give you a marginal advantage over your competition.

Below are the steps to create a niche website in order of occurrence. The list below is a mere introduction to each step. I plan on talking about these in detail in the future.

As I mentioned, this is one of the most important steps in the process which often make or break a niche website’s success. But what is that right topic for your niche website? It is a topic that has a significant enough demand, or search volume, yet not as many competitors, or search results.

How do you find such topics? The Google Adword Keyword Tool is one free resource you can use to guestimate the search volume generated by various keywords within a topic. Simply type in any word relevant to the niche you are contemplating and hit enter or click the relevant button to generate results. The results will show you various attributes, including monthly local and global search volume for various relevant keywords.

Remember that what you will see is only Google’s data. I usually multiply the search demand by 3 to account for the other two big engines Bing and Yahoo, as well as the several other smaller ones in the online space.

To get a sense for the supply, or number of competitors, take a few of the keywords obtained from the exercise above and plug them into the Google search bar in “brackets”. The number of results you see on the top left is the number of websites on the internet competing for that keyword / key phrase. Do a simple ratio of keyword supply and demand and you will be able to rank keywords and topics in order of most favorable to least.

Many go wrong right about when they have found a topic with a high demand to supply ratio. Why? Because they feel this is the be-all end-all of the prep work. However, this is just the beginning of your research stages. I highly recommend researching this topic further to see whether actual demand for products and services pertaining to your topic exist.

Here is an example. Spirituality and religion is one of the most demanded and supplied topics online, probably only next to sex, money and weight loss. Try typing “god” in Google’s search bar. You will see close to a billion results. But how many sponsored ads do you see on the top or right hand side of the screen? Maybe a couple at most.

This tells you that vendors are not spending money to highlight products and services in this niche, at least from an advertising perspective. So if your website’s goal is to generate income from Google Adsense, you can forget about this topic right about now.

Some other avenues to scour to ensure there is true monetization potential of your topic:

Amazon’s bookstore and regular online store (Are there books and guides being sold in your niche? If so are they generating heavy user reviews or are they duds that are simply sitting on the bookshelf?)ClickBank marketplace (Same as Amazon. Are there products relevant to your niche? Are they active?)Ebay auctions (Is activity level high?)CraigslistBlogs and Forums – only those that are receiving heavy traffic (What are the popular topics of discussion? What do folks need help with? Can you address the need?)Existing magazines and journals (i.e. Men’s Health)Existing major websites online that are going to be your competitorTake clues from traditional media such as Television and Radio (What’s hopping and popping these days?)

What are you looking for exactly? You are looking for products, services and advertisements that fit your contemplated niche or website topic. These represent the flow of money that people exchange to deliver and receive items and services of value in your niche.

Once you are settled on a topic you need to start narrowing in on the keywords that you will use to build your website. Why? Because search engines like keywords.

How do search engines work? Web surfers type in key words and phrases, and Google goes out to scour the world and provide you with links that contain those words and phrases, ranked in order of most relevant to least.

The entire internet is one big game of keywords and phrases. If you want to be found online, you want to ensure that your website contains keywords and phrases, which web surfers are searching with. Use the Google Keyword Tool mentioned above to determine this.

The disadvantage in using free tools like Google is that the process is very much manual, cumbersome and tedious. Not to mention that you have to search for keyword supply and demand separately. Depending on the size of your website (the bigger the better in my opinion), this activity alone can take you hours, days, weeks and can bore you to death.

There are more automated tools available online that streamline the process relatively easily. These tools not only give you the best keywords in terms of demand within your niche, but they also tell you the supply and profitability ratio. You can read more about the tools I use here.

After you have collected a set of profitable keywords to target when you build your website, the next most critical step in the sequence is to plan your website’s architectural structure or blueprint. This is another step where many go wrong because they don’t know about it and therefore don’t execute it. Many simply jump into content creation and start building their website with no rhyme or reason.

Just like an architectural blueprint matters when building a home, a site structure matters when building a website. Why? Because the various web pages within your website each serve a purpose and can help each other gain higher search engine rankings if interlinked correctly.

Website blueprint is a topic that can be talked about quite extensively on its own to answer the questions why do it and how exactly to properly plan and build a website. I plan on discussing this in depth in the near future.

For now, think about your website as a pyramid, where the pointed tip (top) is your home page and all underlying pages make up the base. Now there is a big space between the top and the bottom, so what goes in the middle? What goes on the bottom? How deep should the pyramid be? Answers to all those questions will be provided in future discussions either here or on my blog.

Building the website is actually the easiest part of the process in my opinion. It is however the most time consuming.

If you have done your research well, have gathered the right set of keywords to target and have laid those keywords out in a sound website blueprint, executing on the website can be done relatively easy.

This discussion assumes that you are familiar with basic search engine optimization. If you are not, I highly recommend you visit my blog and familiarize yourself with what SEO is and come back here to resume this post.

Building your website entails just a handful of steps. Using any HTML editor, open up a blank HTML file, start typing out your keyword optimized content, add the bells and whistles such as pictures, files, etc, include the proper links to other websites and webpages within your website and you’re done. Rinse and repeat the process for the rest of your webpages and you have yourself a website.

That doesn’t sound like anything extraordinary, so what are we doing so different when building a niche content website? The answer is the keywords we use, the way we use them in each webpage, as well as the linking and interlinking we do within each web page is done in a very specific manner consistent with the niche content site model.

When building a niche content website, each webpage is targeted for one main keyword. This means the webpage is all about that one main keyword, which is used in a specific way in each of the page’s meta tags, headings, and anchor links. Each webpage also has four additional supplemental keywords (totaling five keywords) which are sprinkled within the content of the webpage.

Specific instructions on page creation is also a topic that can be talked about for days. I will be breaking this topic down into several sub-topics that go into the step-by-step detail in the near future. This is probably the most important step in the entire process. Well optimized webpages equates to a well optimized website, which is guaranteed to attract free, organic search engine traffic growth over time.

Many skip this step amidst the anxiety of getting their website up and running on the internet. Truth is nobody likes a lemon. There are varying opinions on whether or not search engines penalize websites with stale or broken links. Frankly, I do not care.

If I am to put out a product on the World Wide Web for the WORLD to see, I want to ensure the product is of the highest quality and reliability. The little bit of additional effort you put up- front today can yield heavy dividends down the road. Remember, no one knows what and how search engines think. So do the best you can to provide a high quality product.

Take some time and search your website for missing images, broken links and convoluted HTML code. There are several free resources online that will help you do this. Just type in “broken links checker” or “HTML code validation” in a search engine and play around with the resources.

There is more than enough garbage on the Internet. Please avoid contributing more to the pile.

Although search engines will eventually pick up a highly optimized website, why not expedite the process if you can? Building and submitting a sitemap takes five seconds.

Google “xml sitemap creators” and download yourself an xml sitemap. Take this file and upload it to the root directory of your server. Some would debate an HTML sitemap does you no good. I’d argue otherwise. Why not? It takes another five minutes to do it. Include a link to the HTML sitemap on your footer or navigation menu. What’s the worst that can happen? Absolutely nothing!

Beware of scams that charge you to submit to 4,545,897 different search engines. None of that matters as long as you submit to Google, Yahoo and Bing, the big three which make up close to 90% of the search engine user market share. If the three have you indexed, it’s just a matter of time before the 4,545,894 others will as well.

Each of the major search engines have instructions on how to submit your sitemap to them. When in doubt, Google “how to __ “. The process is relatively easy and straightforward.

Submitting a sitemap to search engines is not a mandatory step, but because it doesn’t take long and the rewards are so much more significant, I highly recommend you proceed with this task. I’d be more concerned and recommend this as a mandatory step if your website wasn’t content heavy and highly optimized.

Since this is a one and done business model, you don’t have to keep updating your sitemap. However, for those who have websites and blogs that are updated frequently, a BIG inherent challenge that you face is that your sitemap is not automatically updated each time you add new content. I have found a solution to this BIG problem which I talk about on my blog in more depth. Just search for the topic and you will find it.

Once your website has been submitted to search engines, give it some time to soak and gain traction on search results. Search engines take their sweet time in evaluating, trusting and indexing or ranking websites.

While they do this, take the opportunity to put together a digital product for sale and distribution through your website or blog. Having your own product is not a mandatory step in this business model, but is one that I am highly in favor of that I use in most of my niche content websites.

Having your own product guarantees that you have something to sell, and not rely so much on affiliate programs that you have very little to no control over. Your product can be as simple as an eBook, online video series, hard DVDs, or anything else for that matter. You can either create this yourself, or outsource the process. As long as the product is quality and delivers value, you will be just fine while selling it.

Distributing digital products is also very easy. There are turnkey platforms available such as ClickBank that will streamline this process for you quickly and easily.

Because a niche content website model is a one and done model, a newsletter series is important to capture your visitor’s email addresses, build relationships with them automatically over time, and push your digital product and affiliate products for sale.

Draft a 10 to 12 issue newsletter series that is brief in nature but delivers high value to your readers by including some tips, strategies, educational facts, etc. Entice them to sign up for your newsletter by promising a free 12 week email course, free daily tips for two weeks or something similar in nature.

For example, have a look at this Bamboo Plant Care niche website I developed. Notice the email capture box on the right side? Notice how it offers a free Mini Course? Scroll a bit below and you will find that digital product I mentioned above. Now click on any other page of this website other than the homepage and notice the ads on the left and right columns?

Scroll to the footer and notice the Donation button? This is a highly optimized niche website that generates free, organic search engine traffic and monetizes that traffic through advertisement, digital product sales, donations and affiliate sales (affiliate links are embedded within the various webpages and newsletter series).

Once your visitors have signed up for your newsletter, course, etc, you have your chance to wow them with free information that builds relationship and trust. You can then push your product and other affiliate products in latter issues. If you do this step right, your visitors will already be presold, or warmed up for your offer. It will be that much easier to execute the sale when the offer comes around.

Right about now your website should be indexed, or relatively close to it. You will start getting one or two visitors every few weeks, or even months. Yes, the progression is very slow initially until you kick off marketing initiatives (discussed below).

Now is the time to sign up for advertising platforms such as Google Adsense. It takes time to get accepted into their program, and you want to be ready to slap ads on your website once it’s ready for it. Sign up early and let the platforms take their time to get back to you. The ads you saw on the website above were Google Adsense Ads.

This is how I usually kick-off my marketing campaign. Directory submissions are simple to execute, and one way to quickly build some back links to your website to stabilize its place in search engine indexes.

I recommend using a submission tool or a paid service to expedite this process and submit to hundreds of directories over time. Don’t overpay for this services. It’s not expensive and has become a commodity today. Check out my blog for more info on this.

Don’t submit to a thousand and one directories all at the same time either. You need to spread out your link building efforts over time to appear as natural as possible to search engines.

If you are not going to do anything else after you build your niche website, make sure you engage in article marketing to ensure each of your webpages is indexed with search engines. This is also a good way to start building back links not only to your home page, but also to each individual webpage within your website (a concept called DEEP linking).

Here is what has worked for me very well each time. Instead of the age-old advice of linking to your home page using anchor text, link instead to a webpage within your website using anchor text that is relevant to that specific webpage.

For example, say you have 35 webpages, create 35 articles and submit them to a top article directory like Ezinearticles. Make sure each article is linked back to one of the 35 pages on your website. When you’re done, each webpage on your website should have at least one back link to it from a top article marketing directory.

As far as anchor text is concerned, say you have a website on Kitchen Cabinets, and one of the webpages is about bamboo cabinets, make sure that the article that links back to this webpage has the phrase bamboo cabinets in the anchor text link.

This step is optional, but if executed can quickly build a ton more back links to your website, therefore further solidifying your place in search indexes.

You can either manually bookmark several pages of your website, or use one of many automated tools available online that not only bookmark quicker, but can also bookmark on several social bookmarking websites at once.

This strategy can be very powerful if used the right way and spaced out over time. Your marketing efforts must look natural to search engines, so take your time. The more you rush, the more you will raise a red flag.

After you execute the steps above over the course of a couple months, your website should be ripe at the point where it is ready to be monetized. It is just a matter of time before traffic starts picking up, so take the time now to implement monetization methods that you are comfortable with. You can always tweak and experiment over time so do not be afraid to try a combination of various methods.

Personally, a killer combination that has worked very well for me on all my niche websites is the following: contextual ads, private placement ads, sales of my own digital products, affiliate marketing, donations. Yes, I do get trickles coming in from kind souls who enjoy the material on my websites.

Monetization is a heavy topic and one that I will discuss in an entirely separate series of discussions.

There is much more you can do depending on your appetite, capacity and interest level. The steps above however as sufficient to get your website to a point where it can deliver a decent amount of passive income on a residual basis.

When your website gets to that point, you will have a bona fide income producing asset on hand, one that has a value and can be sold or kept to generate cash flow. In fact, I recently sold one of my niche websites. The website was generating a consistent $800 a month or $9,600 a year.

I sold my website for around $28,000, or 3 times the annual earnings. As you can imagine, the more your income producing asset’s annual earnings, the more money you can demand when you sell it, a concept call multiple of earnings. In this case, I sold my website at a multiple of 3 ($9,600 times 3 = $28,800).

In my next post, I will attempt to take one of my niche content websites and dissect it so that I can discuss each of the points mentioned above in more detail and share with you the results of each step.

Of all my side gigs back then and now, this is a topic I am extremely passionate about because this is how I generate most of my income online today. Niche content websites are also the reason I laid off the pedal on real estate investing. The ROI is simply much more, with almost no down side to it.

From my perspective, why fork out cash and expose part of your investment to risk when both can be avoided by generating passive income from niche websites online? I invite you to join my passion and read more about this topic on my blog.

For now, I’d love to hear your questions about any of the material discussed above. What would you like to see covered in more detail? What is missing from the recipe above? Some Sugar? Salt?

Sunil
Building

Sunil is a serial “side gig-preneur” who resorted to the Internet despite being in a comfortable and successful career paying a healthy six figure salary. His Extra Money Blog discusses entrepreneurship, personal finance, and how successful and hard working professionals can get more out of life, whether financial abundance, more freedom of choice, or the flexibility to live life on their own terms. You can read more of his work at: www.easyextramoneyonline.com/blog

¿Si el contenido es el rey lo papel que desempeñan los medios sociales hace?

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In a previous post, I wrote about “How To Get 55 Comments And 98 Likes On Your First Article Using Social Media“. In the article, I spelled out the process I used to gain traction to a blog post I wrote on a brand new blog, using Facebook as the only source of traffic. This article sparked a very interesting discussion, with 61 comments to date.

It also started a debate on whether Social Media is even worth the time invested. My buddy Mitch, who started Blog Mastermind at the same time I did, was a very active part of the discussion. Mitch is someone I respect, and I admire him for the passion he puts into his online business. If it were someone else, I MIGHT not have taken him as seriously, but it’s Mitch, so how can I not take him seriously?

I think Mitch’s perspective can be summarized by one statement that he made (and he can correct me if I’m wrong):

Any time spent getting followers on a Facebook page or Twitter is wasted time you could be producing content that is going to get real followers to your blog.

This sparked an interesting debate on the topic of whether social media platforms contribute any value to the growth of online business. In light of such a strong response, I’ve decided to write this follow-up blog post to shed some additional light on what I believe is the way social media sites like (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc.) can be effectively used to help grow an online business.

Mitch’s statement alluded to the fact that Content is what really matters. This is the great part about what he had to say. Let’s take what he has done as an example. On the day he wrote that comment, he had 9,782 unique visitors to his website that day alone (and it was only noon). On his site, there were 27 new articles scheduled to be released that day. That’s a butt-load of articles, but it’s obviously paying off.

“In the world of Google, Content is king”. I can’t take credit for that statement, and I don’t know where I heard it from, but it’s such a true statement. When it comes to internet marketing, your content is your currency. When a site is just getting started, one of the best ways to get your site noticed by Google is to produce high quality content on a regular basis. Yes, there are other ways to succeed without being a prolific content producer. However, each article you put out there is another entry point for traffic.

Time for a simple math lesson (since I also teach math):

Let’s say you have 10 articles on your website, and each article gets an average of 10 hits via the search engine on a daily basis. Simple math tells us that you can expect to see 100 hits every day (10 x 10). Not bad. 100 visits to your website when you are just starting isn’t a super huge deal, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Now let’s say that you are a beast like Mitch (and I mean that in the best way possible) and you just become a content generating maniac. However, let’s tone down the beastliness and say that after a few months you have 1000 articles on your blog, assuming that each brings an average of 10 visits to your website. What does that mean? 10,000 hits every single day (1,000 x 10).

It’s easy to see that more content is more beneficial. So Mitch is definitely right there.

Many people take this content thing the wrong way. They think that as long as they have a lot of content, they are good to go. However, it’s not just the quantity that matters, it’s also the Quality, even more-so than the amount. The goal of your content should be to not only bring traffic, but to entice your website visitors to become frequent visitors to your site, and where that’s concerned, quality trumps quantity.

A well-written article (or a great audio/video post) that helps your audience solve a pressing problem will do much more than 50 poorly written articles that benefit no one.

When I did my little social media experiment, my goal was just to see how quickly I could get an active discussion going at a brand new blog – in part to be able to write about it and share what I learned. I knew that I couldn’t rely on SEO to drive a good amount of traffic to the blog overnight. SEO is a long term strategy and in my mind, social media was the only way to do something like that so quickly. It worked, because I ended up with 55 comments and 98 likes over the span of a few days. That’s pretty good for a brand new site.

Think about it – news spreads so quickly these days with sites like Twitter and Facebook playing such a big part of life as we know it today. One tweet can cause such a rapid cycle that things happening on the other side of the world can spread within seconds and reach you almost instantaneously. I don’t even watch the news anymore, because it’s much more efficient for me to get my news on Twitter

Let’s briefly touch upon some of the benefits of using social media sites:

It’s Free. There is no cost associated with tweeting or updating your Facebook status.It can yield quick results, as can be seen with the experiment I conducted.It gives you additional platforms to communicate with your subscribers.People spend LOTS of time on these social media sites. It’s good for your business to be where the people are.

Absolutely not. It’s definitely NOT a substitute for generating high quality content on a regular basis. You can spend LOTS of time on these social networking sites and not accomplish anything – especially if you are not over delivering on your content. Just like with any other traffic generating system, your traffic doesn’t matter if it doesn’t convert. Facebook might be able to send you traffic, but it’s up to you to know what to do with it.

As Mitch put it, you’re time is better spent producing quality content that is going to get you REAL followers to your blog.

People tend to listen to the hype of so many gurus out there claiming that social media is the key to success. The part they somehow don’t realize is that whether you use social media or not, building a solid online business is a massive undertaking. Make no mistake. However, if you do plan on using social media to help you grow your business, here are some tips:

Social Networking is not about selling your product. It’s about nurturing relationships with your followers. It’s about gaining trust. Once you have established yourself as a trustworthy, credible source, you are more likely to gain loyal followers that are more likely to purchase your product/service. When I did my experiment, I already had a relationship with my Facebook friends. That’s what Made it so effective.Be personable. People go to Facebook to connect with other People. For the most part, they aren’t looking for sales pitches. Be a real person, and you will get real people to follow you. Don’t be all business, be all YOU!Don’t build a business solely on Social Media. Yes, a social media campaign can be effective. However, you must recognize that you don’t own your Facebook or Twitter account. Facebook and Twitter own your accounts. That being said, always have a solid funnel where you are driving people back to your blog/website to deliver the bulk of the value there and getting them onto YOUR list.Be goal-oriented and get in and out Quickly. I don’t know how many people intend to get on Facebook to check something really quick, and find themselves attached to it 5 hours later. It can be addictive. So, you need to make sure to have a specific goal, and spend a specified amount of time on those sites, if you decide to make it a part of your business.Don’t stop producing AWESOME CONTENT. Your content is your business – NOT your Facebook or Twitter account.

Whether or not you choose to use social media in your online business, or any other strategy for generating traffic and communicating with your followers, keep your priorities in check. Content is King, and there is no substitute.

So what do you think? What’s the role of social media? Does it ROCK? Does it SUCK? Join in on the discussion below.

Yours Socially!

Leslie Samuel

Btw, you can always connect with me on Twitter and Facebook

Leslie Samuel (aka "The Freebie Guy") is a blogger who teaches people how to grow their online business at http://www.thefreebieguy.net/. He has recently started a 7 Day Bootcamp to take people from Beginner to having a fully functional Online Business in 7 days.