Many SEO companies operate a content network to bolster their clients links and drive additional ambient revenue. These are a great way of building authority within a subject and can result in some really great links that you control and that cannot be duplicated by a competitor. Some SEO agencies even adopt this as their majority link building practice (I’m looking at you Smart Traffic), building site after site and populating it with content.
But ther in lies the problem. How do you maintain high quality content across a wide range of subjects without repeating the same topics and how can this content be of-the-moment?
I had a really interesting meeting this week with the owner of Flux Magazine, a fashion/music site who wanted tips on how to improve their revenue. I casually mentioned that we ran a number of fashion blogs with a view to these becoming authority sites in the long run and that getting original content for them was proving difficult as our editorial team simply ran out of steam from time to time.
She looked puzzled and replied “We get all our content, images and videos supplied by the brands PR companies”.
Needless to say a massive penny dropped.
Not only can you get great text content, but also highly topical and even pre-release notification of events leading to your site being completely fresh and on the ball…. awesome! Plus you get to piggy back on the reputation of the brands you mention which should yield to a better long tail, improved ads and click throughs on your affiliate links.
So the very next day I sat the team down and tasked them with contacting key industry PR companies asking to be put on their mailing list for news about the brands the represent. What’s more, from past experience. I know many PR companies will go the extra mile and actually write unique content just for you as opposed to simply sending out the same old press releases you have to re-write.
As a side note this has prompted me to develop Gabriel Hounds, an online PR division which im trialling the PageLines wordpress CMS on… keep checking back for updates.
Very interesting. I have a range of blogs to support our product which has a wide variety of uses. This is a really good idea!
Glad you liked it ;)
It is still said that “Content is the king” and by saying content means only “Quality Content” which most people don’t used to produce and I think this is the reason why people don’t like such sites which have too much content but doesn’t makes any sense in any way. Thanks for posting.
I’m not a big fan of the ‘content is king’ philosophy as the best written site is nothing without good SEO. That being said we are really going to up our game for article marketing etc… so no more Indian or Romanian articles :)
That is an interesting way of getting content – as long as the content is unique. The fact that the PR company may even make it unique for you makes your life a lot easier. The question is whether the content they provide contains good SEO.
True however originating the content in the first place is our biggest challenge. ensureing it has good titles, synonyms etc is the least of our worries.
I still think quality content is king. Drives me crazy when I run into a website that purports to be in English, but was obviously put through a problematic translator.