The word is getting out:Â Content is Everything
To most of my readers, this is old news. But then, my honey attracts a specialized and rare bee – the motivated DIY website publisher.
What I mean is that the greater internet community is catching on finally and it is even spilling over into print media. Or rather flooding into it.
In his Business 2.0 article “Cashing in on the Zeitgeist” (April 2007) Paul Sloan covers Daniel Kovach’s strategy to bring the buzz to his scholarship information site.
Kovach’s strategy is cashing in on trends and buzz in the “how to find a scholarship” market.
He does this by finding stories that get him links from social sites like Digg.
In the Business 2.0 article, Sloan outlines one of Kovach’s biggest successes in generating a high ranking for a trend in the scholarship arena:Â Boston University’s whites-only scholarship.
This story, as you can imagine, was generating heated discussion, lots of news coverage, and a lot of searches on the web related to the topic.
Kovach had a piece written for his site called “The White Man’s Guide To Getting A Minority Scholarship,” and got it into Digg where it hit the front page.
As most people in our industry know, hitting the front of Digg is pay dirt.
And it pays to be a “scholar” of your niche in order to turn up stories and ideas for linkbait like Kovach does.
I’ve outlined how you can be a media sleuth for your market and turn up pieces of gold that you can turn into links and higher rankings in other posts.
There is a lot of truth in Kovach’s statement about being on top of all the information flowing in your market: “You have to sift through it all. No one is going to hand you pieces of trend gold.”
I think this is the big lesson for most content providers and future authority site hopefuls.
In order to be the authority you have to do in your niche what no one else is willing or able to do:Â monitor and capture trends as they are hitting in order to take advantage of the buzz and be one of, if not the first to visibly hit the web with it.
I say “visibly” because there is a lot that goes unnoticed on the web by the majority of every market niche.
Which means there is a massive opportunity in building and marketing sites that help people find things.
The search engines all have different ways to displaying their idea of the top ten for any search term.
Most searches are casual and interest tends to fizzle out past the first page or two of results.
People quickly get frustrated by their results even if they are on what they consider to be the best search engine on the planet.
That’s where the authority site publisher comes in.
Not only is an authority site publisher good at isolating and capitalizing on trends in a market, but they are search engine savvy and can put themselves on the front page of the engines for their desired search terms.
The combination of the two is a deadly one. It’s a one-two punch that cannot be defeated except by other rare publishers with this skill set.
And there’s 9 spots available in the top ten for that kind of competition. To this day, despite the plethora of search engine optimization firms and free SEO advice galore, search engine rankings are mostly accidental.
When you marry buzzworthy content skills with the ability to control your search result destiny, there’s not much anyone can do to stop you from dominating your niche.
That means traffic, and a lot of it. Which leads to monetization through advertising, product creation, affiliate marketing, and lead generation.
It is a formula. Although it has a lot of moving parts, it is the only formula for assured domination in any market on the web that will be viable even after 10 more generations of fly-by-night cheating strategies come and go.
The way to learn this art and science is to hang out in places where people actually practice it successfully.
The ideal would be to find a place where publishers practice it almost religiously. There you can key in on how to best put it to use to bump your site(s) in rankings and traffic by watching what the core is doing.