Best Website Content Strategy Produces Hefty Revenue

The best website content strategy produces more revenue and audience when it is both deep and broad.

“Content is King” is a well-known saying when online publishers debate how to succeed at growing profits and revenue. But the saying doesn’t really say much.

What it really means is that a content strategy in two forms produces the revenue — abundant quantity and optimized quality.

Traditional media websites are losing market share for both audience and revenue, according to studies from various industry organizations. The problem is largely related to the lack of broad content on media sites.

It may surprise some media people to hear that claim. But the reality is that millions of online publishers are creating billions of pages of content. Much of that content is stored for long shelf life.

Media sites emphasize news and sports, which tend to have a short shelf life. The articles get old and in time may get the ax.

Even if they aren’t deleted, it is the nature of news and sports content to have lower readership value over the long run because they are dated. Evergreen content with permanent value — such as travel, entertainment, recreation, home, gardening — holds onto its value.

Publishers and editors who optimize website content for massive depth and breadth while also optimizing it for search engines will produce revenue for the life of the site, even when an article is years old.

4 Steps for Best Website Content

A site publisher who wants to build the best site content possible can follow a few basic steps:

1. Make it a daily or weekly habit to archive and tag content in a way that makes it easy to find when it is old. This builds the quantity of content while at the same time improving the quality via search engine optimization.
2. Spend more time on content that has long shelf life and less time on content that doesn’t. In other words, spend more time on content that has reader value for months or years and less time on content tied to events and dates. That doesn’t mean publishing less event-driven “news”. It means that articles can be shorter and should receive less time-consuming “packaging.”
3. For a small site, dedicate part of the time each week to building out additional archives. For a larger site, hire someone who will provide the kind of thoroughness and logical structure to online archives that libraries receive.
4. Update old content with new material. Search engines respond favorably to old articles with new content. Adding content may also result in higher rankings for the articles in search engine results.

Many content websites have an advantage with quality and disadvantage with quantity of content. One way to grow site audience and site revenue is for those sites to be masters of both.