You Need Some Content

If your web site is like most, the majority of your visitors will come from search engines. Search engines refer people to your site because you have content that does a better-than-average job of dealing with what the user wants. Therefore, if you want visitors, you need to have great content.

Some web business owners spend considerable time trying to get search engines to recommend their sites. There are things you can do to increase the likelihood your site will be recommended. This is called "search engine optimization" or "SEO." You'll learn how to do some optimization in later 20 minute tasks. But by far the most useful thing you can do is create great content that users want. A good rule of thumb is to spend 99% of your time on creating relevant content and only 1% of your time on optimization.

What Content Do You Need?

You need content that members of your market niche are likely to search for. Those are the people you want to attract. When others visit your site, it uses up resources without giving you much payoff.

How Do You Know What Your Niche Wants?

There are three main ways you find out what people in your market niche want:

• Magazines and Competitors. The topics that magazines and web sites publish are the ones they've found by experience attract the people they want. If they didn't, they wouldn't stay in business.
• News. When a news story breaks that's of interest to members of your niche, many of them will search for information about it. If you learned about the news and quickly put an authoritative article about it on your web site, the search engines are likely to send people to you. Remember how you set Google Alerts on your keywords? Every day you'll receive email from Google telling you what's "news." You may also hear a news story that would interest your niche on TV or read about one in a newspaper. When you notice items that are appropriate for your site, go to work quickly to get an authoritative article up.
• Your Users. As your site becomes more popular, your visitors will email you with ideas and questions. Some of them will give you ideas for content.

Your 20 Minute Task

Take out a sheet of paper or start a spreadsheet. Also, take out the lists you made for the Search for Problems task in the "Know Your Niche" module and the Keyword One and Keyword Two and Three tasks from your "Making Money" folder.

Compile the topics from the lists into a single list. Don't include duplicates. If you get ideas as you do the task, write them down. When you're done, file everything, even the papers you took from the other folders, in your "Making Money" folder.