Web Content Cost Considerations

When web content gets discussed on webmaster bulletin boards, most common question is, "how much should I pay?" That question is both perfectly logical, and perfectly misguided:

* Logical, because biggest expense of any website, with possible exceptions of advertising and promotion, is content. You only have to get web development and design once, but content needs to be added regularly for your site to be successful.

* Misguided, because real question isn't how much you are going to pay, but how much you are going to invest. Your content, if it's done right, will make you money. In fact, it can easily make back its cost within a month. So real question you should ask a web content provider is: how much will it make me?

Calculating Your Web Content's Value

Ultimately, your web content is one part of your site that makes you money. The code, design, and even traffic, while important, are not what ultimately get a visitor to take action. You have to tell or ask visitors to take action. Telling and asking take words.

Small changes in your web content can make big differences in bottom line. Take a look:

Advertising/affiliate revenue:

Let's say you have a web page that averages $25/day in revenue from advertising and/or affiliate links. You have a professional writer optimize content on page to get more clicks. Watch what happens:

1. If just 20% more visitors click on affiliate or advertising links, your revenue will increase $5/day, $150/month, and $1825/year. If your page maintains its current level of traffic for three more years, that's a $5475 increase, just for that one page.

Blunder Number 1: Not including an author's resource box/ezine advertisement

Yes, there are really authors who don't remember to include an author's resource box (the biography/advertisement at end of article). That box is whole point of distributing content in first place. Even if body of your article has a link to your website, you'll be losing all clicks from dedicated ezine readers who look for that box at end of articles they like.

Blunder Number 2: Not including a link in your ezine article's author's resource box

There are a shocking number of author's who use an author's resource box to include their email address, telephone number, street address, gym locker combination, and everything else but a link to their website. This is a big waste for two reasons:

1. Few people will contact you directly without seeing your web page first. At that point, people just aren't motivated enough. All they know about you is that they liked an article you wrote.

2. Search engines rank web pages in part based on "link popularity" i.e., number, quality, and relevance of links to a website. You may not care about search engines now, but if you ever do in future you will be pretty upset at having wasted all these opportunities for link popularity.

Blunder Number 3: Not including an HTML-formatted link with "anchor text" in your ezine article's author's resource box

As much as reasonably possible, you want to encourage publishers to publish your author's resource box with link in HTML, using your chosen anchor text (i.e., text you click on to follow link, traditionally displayed in blue and underlined), if it's going to be shown in a web page or HTML newsletter. If article is being distributed as plain text, you can include a link to an HTML-formatted version on your website. There are three reasons for this: