Posts Tagged ‘content’

Dear Content Thieves,

I recently stumbled upon one of the recent articles I’ve written here posted on one of your sites. There was no mention whatsoever of the original author. My content was posted on your site as if it was your own. Like if you had written it yourself.

At first I felt pretty angry – couldn’t you at the very least link back to the source?

I started thinking… how much of our content are you guys stealing and publishing as if it was your own? So I searched on Google for short extracts from some of our latest posts. The results were pretty astonishing! There are tons of content thieves like you out there! Much more than I’d expected.

Now it’s one thing if you quote someone and link back to the original source. That’s totally fine with me. But steal my content and publish it like if it was your own? That’s ugly, ain’t it?

If you think about it though, you’ll realize that being a content thief doesn’t really benefit you. When you steal content, or in general when you use someone else’s work like if it was your own (content, design, code, etc), you position yourself one step behind your competition.

By always copying and looking for other people’s stuff, you’re constantly trying to catch up with your competition. You’ll always stay a step behind.

If you want to make someone else’s content available on your site – just include a link to the source! Your readers will appreciate you more for it. You’ll gain credibility and your audience will widen. People like transparency and appreciate being exposed to new sources. They’ll come back to you for more, hoping they’ll discover some new sites and authors.

It just pays more to be honest.

Cheers!
Noam.

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Writing good blog posts can mean many different things. I like to have at least 50% of the posts we publish be “high quality” posts which provide a “real” value to our readers. I’m not talking about distributing free products (even though that’s great and we do it all the time). I’m talking about these posts that are a bit longer, are formatted nicely to make it easier to read, have a nice illustration or picture, and mainly deliver a really valuable content.

These posts take 90% of the time we spend on writing. Is it worth it? (more…)

Start your designs with the content that goes on the page – not the other way around.

Don’t design “boxes”, “areas”, or “structure” and then fill them out with the content you think will go there.

Instead, start by designing the main elements based on the content that you want to communicate on the page. That way you’ll be sure to include the content right away into your design strategy. Content is what matters most.

Start with the content and how you want to display it. That title, that image, this slogan and that short text. Here goes the navigation, there the main call to action. Here some additional content/options. How do I want to display these elements in order to make sure I will achieve my goals? The rest should follow.

Related posts:

• Web Design Is All About Content
• Attractive Content Rules Web Design

Keep this well in mind when creating content for your website! Any website you get from Template Action or Website Temple comes with an extensive (yet very  easy-to-use) Content Management System, or CMS. You can quickly and easily edit and update your website any time, without training or prior web design coding knowledge.

This will give you a lot of power over how your website will look. And that’s because web design really is all about content! (more…)

I’ve seen this happen many times over!
Companies have great intentions on keeping up with their blogs and online social networking efforts, regularly adding great articles, updating their Twitter statuses, etc… But then  after a few weeks, these tasks become somewhat of a burden and they start investing less and less in these efforts. Well, the thing about Inbound Marketing (i.e. promoting your site using blogs, social engines, search engines, etc…) is that the results won’t happen overnight. You can get great results over time, but you need to consistently invest in promotion efforts, content creations, etc…

The problem starts when you try to come up with great articles to post on your blogs, and think about writing a new post as one of the many tasks you need to accomplish. Inevitably, this approach leads to procrastination, until one day keeping up with your Inbound Marketing efforts become another line at the bottom of your long to-do list.

So how can you quickly and easily create new and interesting content for your blog and Twitterstatuses? The answer is rather simple – write about what you do! You do all kinds of things everyday. And a lot of what you do would be very interesting to your company’s readers and followers. Don’t plan too much – just write something about what you did lately, or found interesting yourself. Share a great resource you use, talk about a design update you finished, mention something that happened within the team you work with, talk about how your company was interviewed, or spread the news about a new project that your company launched. Better yet – give something for free!

These are all interesting posts that generate a lot of traffic and interest to our web design company. And if really you have nothing to say at all, well you can always link to the latest post on our blog! So stay tuned.