Content Site System

In his free special report, The Rebirth Of Internet Marketing, John Reese says you should give stuff away without even asking for an opt-in. My first attempt at this can be found here: Affiliate Blueprint. It mentions many of the tools and techniques I’ll be explaining in this blog. If you download it (and read it, of course), do me a favour and post a comment!

Content sites are websites which provide useful information to visitors. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this:

• Having your own website means that you can join the mass of people who share their ideas and experiences on the Internet. It’s important that you develop your ability to think critically. Reading what others have to say and commenting on it makes you a better citizen of the world - less likely to take things at face value, more likely to have your own opinions about what’s going on around you. Regular writing exercises the brain and becomes easier the more often you do it.
• You might want to make money on the Internet. There are thousands of ways to do this. Building content sites is a core skill which will allow you to stake your claim in the virtual world.
• Pure content sites which provide good quality information tend to get ranked highly by the search engines. Search engine ranking can account for as much as 40% of the traffic to your site, so it makes sense to give them what they want.
• Sites with useful information are much more likely to be bookmarked by their visitors. Social bookmarking on sites like Furl, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon can provide a lot of traffic.
• Once you have built up the traffic to a site by providing quality content, you can steer the traffic anywhere you want. Your content site can become a feeder site for sales pages or affiliate sites, or you can add text ads, Adsense or affiliate links to the site.

Not long ago, setting up a website was slow and painful. You needed a WYSIWYG HTML editor like FrontPage or DreamWeaver, and more often than not an expensive web designer. Then you’d need a graphic designer, maybe a programmer and probably an SEO expert.

Nowadays things are much simpler. You can install WordPress, a blog program, on your own web space in under 5 minutes. WordPress You can start creating content within minutes. The blog directories like Technorati and IceRocket can be notified instantly every time you add content.

WordPress is much more than just a blog program. There is a large and dedicated user community which constantly creates add-on programs - called “plug-ins” which expand the basic program’s capabilities. WordPress is flexible and easy to use.

Where do you start? This series of articles is intended to help you get your content site up and running quickly and easily, as long as you can use a web browser.