This is a continuation of last week's article on online copywriting. In the previous article we focused on style. Here we cover content creation strategies and techniques.
Creating Content
Many blogs, forums and articles say you should produce quality content, but what exactly is quality content? First let's define crap content. From the article "The Web Encourages Crap Content"
...It is almost always expensive to produce quality content, which is why YouTube, et al, consists almost entirely of people making silly faces. Again, there are exceptions, but this is generally true. People spend time, and that time costs. The more time they spend, the more thought goes into the process, the more the content costs to produce. When will we see quality content on YouTube, Google Video, etc? When we pay for it, in one way or another.....I was in a bookshop yesterday, and there was just so much interesting stuff - so much "quality" content. I find that I spend longer and longer on the web and don't come across anywhere near as much quality content as I do in the average bookshop, and the reason is that it is seldom worthwhile producing quality content for the web.
Book content has much more quality than the web. Even blogs and sites perceived as quality resources rarely match book quality in depth, and style.
So what is quality content? It's exactly that: quality content. It's something you put time, effort and thought into. It's not a quick blog post, but a well-thought-out, in-depth article. Jakob Nielsen of Useit.com shares his content creation strategy in his 200th article since 1995. His approach is to create in-depth articles as opposed to short posts with little value. His argument is that in-depth articles offer much more value than short blog posts to search engine visitors.
A Different Approach to News Coverage
Picture a search engine user who is researching a past news story. He was not interested in the topic when the event occurred, or simply did not keep track of all coverage. He needs a review of the event starting with the cause, listing the players in the event, showing its impact, offering a strategic perspective, an official version of the events, commentary and editorial.
In most cases we have to look around for this content on different websites. In many cases if you search for news, many low quality blog posts pop up. If, on the other hand, someone was to offer an article with all the details of the story in place, users would appreciate it and link to it much more. This is pure link bait, created with nothing more than news.
You can track news stories in your industry from start to finish and then create an in-depth article about the story, including many links to different publications with your own commentary. With this approach to news reporting you will miss many hot links when the news come out, but you can gather many links over time, as people tend to go back and review stories. Sometimes they just need a good article to cite in their research or a resource to do their own investigation.
Rustybrick has a very neat widget called Rusty Budget. You can "bookmark" stories into different folders, and then come back and review them.
Search Optimization 
