As a webmaster providing information content to an ever-growing Internet audience, you should become familiar with
expression, "Content is king!" The reason is because once you’ve spent time and money building your audience and clicking off major hit counts each month, content is one thing that will keep your visitors loyal to your site.When I first heard that expression I disagreed: In new media realm of Internet, I believed content was secondary to web site design, ease of navigation, loading time, and a half-dozen other technical aspects.
That’s not completely true. I have learned that what you present on your site is at least as important as how you present it (and how often), if you expect to give your visitors a reason to come back time and time again.
The good thing is that in today’s Internet world, content is readily available. Online syndication firms like iSyndicate.com [http://www.isyndicate.com] and Moreover.com [http://www.moreover.com] allow you to download JAVA script or similar HTML code for free that automatically places fresh, daily updated content on your site.
But as Internet matures, carrying somebody else’s content and having your visitors redirected to other web sites to read that content may not be enough to sustain loyalty to your brand any longer. For instance, one thing web advertisers are looking for these days besides a mega-hit count is amount of time surfers spend on your site. You may get 120,000 visitors a day but if they’re only staying 2 or 3 minutes, that’s not as valuable to an advertiser as a site getting 76,000 hits per day with surfers staying as long as 8 or ten minutes.
What you should think about, then, if you’re serious about providing information content, is to consider a way to keep visitors coming to your site more often – then staying there to read content you provide.
You can do that by either developing your own content in-house or by incorporating syndicated content onto your site. The former is best but latter will do as well.
If you’re not journalistically inclined yourself, you can usually find experienced (or even aspiring) reporters and journalists who would jump at chance to hone their craft at your site. This method would cost you little, depending upon level of experience you were seeking to hire, and it would help keep you busy providing your visitors with that fresh content you’re after. An average payment fee for online reporters and writers is around 5 cents per word, with articles averaging about 500 to 750 words each.
