October 30, 2021 - Alterna Invest

Key Takeaways New content on your site ensures growth and growth protects your investment from competition. Long form, high-quality content is required to achieve top page position on search engines. Average recommended article length in 2021 is 1500-2100 words. You can outsource content production but at a cost. Avoid buying cheap, low-quality content from non-English speaking countries. The lower cost is not worth it as those articles will not generate views. A number of tools can help you with content ideas: Ubersuggest, Buzzsumo, Google Trends, Google Search auto-suggestions and many others. Avoid buying premium versions of these tools in the beginning. So you have decided that website investing as an active investor is for you and found your first profitable niche site. The next step is to grow the site’s content. There are two ways to do that. One is to become a content producer yourself, and two is to buy content from an experienced writer. We recommend you do both to speed up your results. Why do I need to grow the site? The apparent fact is that a bigger site will eventually be more profitable. However, you might say I want the website for passive monthly income and don’t want to do more work. So let the website pay for itself. That is a valid point. However, this strategy might only work well if your newly acquired website enjoys a monopoly in a given space and doesn’t have to compete constantly. Growth is a risk-mitigating strategy. By constantly working on your new investment, you ensure its income stream remains stable. Search engines don’t like websites that don’t get regular updates. If you don’t update your content for a while, somebody will eventually outrank you in the search engines, and then your monthly income will suffer. What type of content should I create? The most straightforward form of content to start with is written content. To get your growth strategy going, you should invest in long-form, high-quality articles. Long-form content means you should avoid short articles of less than 500 words in length. Ideally, you want to write something that is in the 1000-1500 word range. Although that number is slowly creeping up. In 2021, if you are looking to rank on the top pages, even 1500 word articles might not be enough. Average length of articles in the top ten is now sitting just above 2000 words. SEO companies constantly test what the ideal content length is, and their recommendations change all the time. However, it is safe to say that content that fully explores a topic or answers a question well, will win. You might need 500 words to do that, or you might need 3000. Don’t focus on the word count as much as the content itself. That said 500 word article might not be enough to rank well. Avoid adding unnecessary fluff to increase word count but instead look for ways to expand on the topic. If you were fortunate and bought a content site in the niche you are an expert in; you can quickly go through the content already posted and see what type of articles are missing. Then, fill in the gaps by adding additional content that your readers will find beneficial. Tools to help with content ideas Before exploring how to buy content, first you have to know what content to buy or write. Even if you are an expert on the topic, you might still have too many content ideas. To hone in on specific article ideas, your best solution is to look at the competition. Thankfully there is a myriad of tools to help with that. Find content ideas using Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest offers three free searches a day that you can utilize to find relevant content ideas, more if you open a free account. For example, you purchased a content site about coffee. The next step would be to Google “Best Coffee Blogs” to get an idea of who is your main competition. You find out that sprudge.com is one of your main competitors, great! Go to Ubersuggest and enter “sprudge.com” in the search bar. Scroll down to see “Top SEO Pages.” These pages drive traffic to that website. Ask yourself, can you buy content that is better? Perhaps, you can produce better content yourself. Maybe you can spin it differently, or give more focus to the product or focus on a different geographical area, or target a diverse age group, and so on. Repeat for other competitors. The idea is simple, take what is popular, and do it better or differently. Find content ideas using Buzzsumo. Like Ubersuggest, you can utilize the free version of Buzzsumo.com to get ideas on what is trending right now on social media for your competitors. Type in the competitor’s URL, rinse, and repeat. Find content ideas using Google itself. We are continuing with the coffee niche example. Go to Google and start typing anything coffee-related. Google will automatically help you complete the query with the most popular search term. For example, if you type in “best coffee grinder,” you get the following suggestions from Google: Pick one and explore what pages rank at the top of the page. Explore the content and see if you can produce something better, more detailed or different. Rinse and repeat. Avoid expensive paid tools at this time. There are premium versions of the tools like Ubersuggest and Buzzsumo premium, plus many others. These premium tools usually offer unlimited search results and in-depth analysis of what type of content you should create. However, in the beginning, you can get away with using the above-mentioned free tools. Save your money to produce high-quality content. With the gaps you identify and suggestions that these tools output, you should have a viable list of articles to create. The next step is to get to work. How to buy content from a writing service? You made your initial investment, and now you have to decide to either produce content on your own or outsource it. The best bet is probably to do both. This is so you can learn how to write the content on your own, learn even more about the niche you just invested in, and become a better content producer in the long term. But to get you started, it is not a bad idea to hire some help. The service that we have used when making website investments for the last little while has been WriterAccess. We encourage beginner website investors to stay away from freelance matching services like UpWork or Fiverr. This, of course, is our personal opinion, but the quality of work on these platforms is lacking. Furthermore, these platforms attract many unvetted freelance writers. As a result, you have to go through many orders before finding someone who is actually good. Because of that, we have wasted thousands of dollars on poor-quality content. Although these platforms typically offer multiple revisions and satisfaction guarantees, the quality was hard to find. How much should you pay for content? This will depend on the niche, but if you decide to use Writer’s Access, we recommend going with 5 Star service and above. On average, that would cost $0.08 (8 cents) per word. That means it would cost you $80-$100 for a 1,000-word article. At that level, articles will be well-researched and well-written, but you might still have to edit them to integrate them smoothly into your site. Why can’t I outsource much cheaper content? Back in the day, many sites could get away with buying insanely cheap content from non-english speaking countries. I remember seeing ads for $0.01 - $0.02/word articles. On top of insanely cheap writing, word length of 400-500 articles was also sufficient. Because there simply wasn’t enough content on the internet, Google would rank these pages on top if they came somewhat close to answering the searchers query. Those days are long gone. 2 cent a word article ordered from Philippines, that is 400 words in length will almost never rank. There are exceptions as always, but it is almost always not worth it. Spending even $10 for an article that will never have a chance to get views, is $10 thrown away. Less is more. Quality trumps quantity. Check content quality with Yoast SEO. Do this before you approve any articles. If you purchased a content site, the original owner should have hosted it on WordPress. We would recommend avoiding any content sites not hosted on WordPress. At this point, WordPress is just too powerful not to use for a content website. That said, with WordPress, you have access to a completely free, incredible SEO tool, Yoast SEO. After installing it, you copy and paste your newly purchased article to ensure you get the following: Yoast provides you with readability and SEO scores, as well as detailed suggestions on how to improve each. Follow the advice that Yoast includes point by point, and you will achieve perfect optimization for SEO without any heavy lifting. However, if you still get a low readability or SEO score after implementing the plugin’s recommendations, reach out to the writer you hired and ask for a revision. Proofread and revise Proofread and revise any purchased content to match the general structure and “voice” of your site. Even when you buy content from the best writers in the world, there will still be something that you won’t like about it. Avoid being a perfectionist and rewriting every single article to match your style perfectly. That said, you absolutely still need to proofread and make small adjustments where necessary. Next steps You will need a constant flow of content to maintain your website’s position and protect monthly profits. On top of that, new content, if executed correctly, will drive growth. Traffic growth will mean higher revenue, and since fixed costs of content sites are low, that means higher profits. Furthermore, you can reinvest your increased profits to produce even more content, fuelling the growth until you are ready to exit your investment and sell your website.