20. Adding new Content to Your Site

In this Chapter, we’ll discuss the best ways to add articles to your site, and look at a great tool that automatically deals with interlinking these articles, and much more.

OK, you have just received 100 articles for your niche site (maybe you wrote them, hired a ghost writer, or just got them from an article membership site). What next?

The easy answer here is for me to say "publish them on your site", but this answer is not as easy to carry out as it sounds.

You have to:

1. Create a web page for each article and paste it in.

2. Make sure there are links pointing to your articles.

The truth about publishing content is that it is time consuming to do it properly.

There are also some other considerations. Should you publish all 100 articles at the same time, or should you "drip-feed" them into your site? There is a lot of talk on the internet about Google penalising sites that spring up over-night, so publishing 100 articles in one go might raise some eyebrows and get your site a penalty.

Before we look at how to publish articles on your site, let’s consider the "how many" question first.

Websites should be constantly growing. By that, I mean you should be adding more content over time. That might be 10 articles a month, or 1 article every six months, but there should be some growth there. Let me ask you a question.

"How many articles are you intending to publish each month to your site?"

Do you have a figure in your head?

That is the number I would use to answer the original "how many" question. If you want to publisher 10 articles a month to your site, then I would publish 10 of the original 100 immediately, and then another 10 next month, and so on. If you intend to publish 100 articles to your site every month, then it is safe to publish all 100 immediately, then your next batch of 100 next month, and so on.

If you are publishing 10 a month, then I recommend splitting those 10 up into 4 groups of 2 or 3, and publishing one group every week.

OK, now we have covered the "how many", let’s look at the "how to".

Here is a list of the things I recommend you check off the list when publishing content to your site:

1. Content should be unique. If you are getting your content from article membership sites, I recommend you change the content considerably before publishing to your site. I regularly get asked, how much of a change in the original article is enough. My answer is always the same – the more the better.
2. Content should be variable length. Have articles that are 100-150 words, others in the 150-300 range, still more that are 300-500, and some in the 500+ range. It is important to make your site look natural, and a site with 500, 250 word articles is not natural, and will get spotted easily.
3. Put each article on a separate webpage.
4. Create an article map (or sitemap) that contains links to all articles using keyword rich link text.
5. Cross-link related articles. If you have 5 articles that are highly related, link each article to the other 4, so that each of these article now have an additional 4 links pointing to them.
6. Put links to new articles on a prominent page of your site. e.g. I always have a "New Article" section on my homepage which lists the latest articles added to my site. This gets the new articles spidered quickly, but also tells the search engines that my site has changed, and that there is more content.
7. Consider varying the link text used for internal (i.e. links on your site pointing to the article) links to an article, especially as the number of links that point to an article increases. I find that search engines don’t currently mind if the internal links pointing to an article are all the same (as opposed to links coming in from other sites, which do need to be different), but to future proof my sites, I do use varying link text for all internal links pointing to an article.
8. Do get links from other sites to your article pages. Many webmasters just get links to their homepage, but this is not natural. If the content on a site is good, the search engines will expect the articles to have links from other sites.

I did tell you that publishing content was time-consuming, and this list highlights that.

Now, all of this can be done "manually", and in fact some of these things do need to be carried out manually, but there is some help available for those who publish a lot of content.

About a year ago, I developed a tool to help simplify the whole process of publishing content. The tool is called Content Publisher (oddly enough), and I want to give you a brief overview of which areas it can help with. Before I do that, I should warn you. Content Publisher was a tool originally developed for my own use, and so it was developed to use Server Side Includes (SSI) for much of its functionality. It does require a working knowledge of SSI to achieve its magic. The manual that comes with Content Publisher does have an SSI primer in it, which is sufficient for most users to get up to speed.

OK, so how can this tool help?

In the 8 point check list, Content Publisher can help with points 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Let’s discuss these 6 points in more detail and see how exactly Content Publisher handles each one.

#3 – Content Publisher uses your template and publishes each article on a separate web page.

#4 – Content Publisher builds an article map (or interlinked maps if you have a lot of content) which links to all articles on your site.

#5 – Content Publisher analyses your articles, and builds a Server Side Include for each article which contains links to related articles (you specify how many related articles you want included). These SSIs are automatically inserted into the article by using special code in your article template.

#6 – Content Publisher creates an SSI that has links to each of your article maps. If you have 200 articles split over 5 article maps, then Content Publisher will create an SSI that has links to each of these 5 article maps. By including this SSI on your homepage, or sitemap page, articles are easily found and spidered.

Content Publisher can also create an SSI that includes links to New Articles. When you publish some new articles to your site, this SSI changes, so that it contains links to the new articles. This SSI can be included on the homepage of your site, so that visitors and search engines automatically find new content.

#7 – Content Publisher can handle "Alternative Link Text". You specify several different link texts you would like to use for each article, and Content Publisher will randomly pick one every time it links to that article in a "related article" SSI. This ensures that articles have varying link text in the links pointing to it.

#8 – Content Publisher has a fantastic feature that allows you to bundle up your articles into a package, and send them to other webmasters. This package contains a program file, example templates and instructions for the other Webmaster.

The other Webmaster only needs to edit the template, click a button, and have all your articles published on separate web pages, together with an article map that they can link to. You provide free content to these webmasters, in exchange for links back from your articles.

To enhance your chances of getting the content published on other sites, I have a little trick, which works great.

Take a web page from your target site, create the templates for that site, and compile the package. When the other webmaster receives your package, they don’t even need to edit the templates, as you have done that for them. They just click a button, and upload. You know what is even better? The program that they run is hard coded with your affiliate URL, so that if the other Webmaster wants to find out about this great publishing tool, they are cookied with your affiliate link. Should they buy, you get the commission on the sale. This feature of Content Publisher means that not only can you get your content spread around on other sites, you can also make money if the other webmasters buy the tool for themselves.

Content Publisher can add content to any site. It does not matter what web site editor you use.

One final point on this software. You CAN use it to drip-feed content onto your site. Just import all of your articles into a project, select the content you want published, and publish it. Next week, select a few more articles, and publish those, and so on.

For more details on Content Publisher, visit the homepage.

Since we have covered the basic site building concepts, in the next Chapter we’ll start on the most important part of creating a profitable site – off-page factors. These are the factors that will build traffic to your site.

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