Content is the king. How to or generate much content?

Content makes your website attractive to Internet users – I mean good quality content. But even if you try hard and write 10-12 hours a day you will experience a shortage of content. One can’t generate enough content – it is the belief of every site owner. Every person who is in affiliate marketing is on the search for more content and more links.

You have a few options to increase content of your website (besides writing it yourself). For example, hire more copywriters, run a popular community or provide some free services that will attract people (image storage, contests, blog storage, etc) to add stuff to your website.

Another source of free and legitimate content is public domain resources – resources that are no more protected by copyright. Project Gutenberg is probably the best known resource of this kind.

What is Project Gutenberg? It is the biggest collection of free e-books. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented electronic books back in 1971.

You are free to use, re-publish e-books from the project website (but it does not guarantee that you are the first to publish the stuff online and you are not protected from duplicate penalty content).

Project Gutenberg lists top books and authors – it helps to find most valuable e-books (in addition to the Advanced Search). Here is top 10 of top 100 sample:

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (445)

2. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci (395)

3. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (336)

4. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser (277)

5. How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin (232)

6. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (196)

7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (190)

8. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen (181)

9. The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi (167)

10. Forbidden books of the original New Testament by William Wake (166)

The website also lists Top 100 EBooks yesterday, Top 100 Authors yesterday, Top 100 EBooks last 7 days, Top 100 Authors last 7 days, Top 100 EBooks last 30 days, Top 100 Authors last 30 days

Added to e-books, you will find music, audio e-books and some other digital content.

You will be amazed at the stats – nearly half a million of e-books are added monthly. There are e-books in many languages, but most come in English.

Summary: in addition to a simple download and posting of e-books on your website Project Gutenberg is a great resource to conduct all kinds of research in your industry. While browsing the lists you are likely to get new ideas for your website.

[tags]Project Gutenberg, public domain, copywriters, copyright, affiliate marketing, home based business, work from home, free content, electronic book, e-book, audio, video, digital[/tags]

Competition exists on every level, it is a fact. eBay states it does not see any threat from Google Checkout and at the same time adds it to the prohibited payment methods for the auction members. Check their current Accepted Payments Policy (you will not find any reference to Google Checkout, but the latter is definitely one of ‘not permitted on eBay.com’).

Next piece of news from the auction giant are significant replacement in the top management team of the company. The most important changes:

- Skype President has replaced PayPal President
- Skype VP of Products has become President of Skype.
- Skype North America GM is now Chief Marketing Officer (Skype Worldwide).
- The former Shopping.com head has become eBay international President.

Such changes are a sign of the threats/ difficulties the company experiences at the moment. The top company threat (this is also applicable to the rest of leading online businesses) is Google, the future monopoly of the Internet business.

[tags]google, ebay, paypal, skype, shopping, gm, auction, online business, google checkout[/tags]

New sites have (practically) no chance to rank well in Google – most significant traffic source for ANY online resource. Taking into the account the number of new websites and blogs that pop up in thousands daily it is hard to get top rankings in Google – the number of top positions is limited. There are established and authority sites that make it hard to compete with for the top places.

Established sites also search for new and additional traffic sources. No site can get enough traffic.

So, what is left for us? What are the ways to get extra traffic, besides Google, for established sites and new ones?

Below is a short survival guide. Certainly, not every technique works for every type of the website and it is not 100% guarantee that the traffic you generate via below ways will help you greatly and you will stop dreaming of Google traffic. But every bit helps…

1. Contests. Weekly, monthly, any. Remember to add it to special contest directories, also to Volition.com and FatWallet.com sweeps forums.

2. PPC. You can test second tier PPC (in addition to Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords) engines – they are chaper, but be ready for high % of fraud clicks.

3. Social bookmarking websites (del.icio.us & similar). A nice free tool that allows to bookmark your content with a number of the most popular websites: www.onlywire.com – saves tons of time.

4. Much unique and good content that can work as viral marketing to spread word about your website.

5. Many quality links – they are valuable for SEO to improve your search engine rankings, but they also can become an important traffic source.

6. Press releases. Find angles monthly. A great list of services to submit your press releases to is here

7. Tests for $ (buy a few links; an established site; expired domains; directory listings; e-zine adv)

8. e-Mail marketing: be in touch with your visitors

9. Target other search engines: Yahoo!, MSN, Ask

10. Affiliate programs (if you have a product or service for sale): build a network of affiliates. It is better to run an in-house affiliate program.

11. Participate in the top forums of your industry. Remember to add signature that will be automatically displayed with your every post.

12. Search webmaster forums for traffic generation techniques specific to your type of the website:

www.sitepoint.com

www.digitalpoint.com

www.wickedfire.com

www.webmasterworld.com

13. Classifieds (incl. Craigslist).

14. Award sites (top 100 sites, etc)

15. Mega traffic mega quick: read this great post on fast traffic generation ways

16. Join some blog carnivals

17. Buy traffic – useless, but it exists as a technique and you can waste a portion of your adv budget

18. Explore your logs: where your visitors come from: more efforts to that channel promotion

19. Alexa top 100 traffic sites: need to discover ways to get your tiny traffic stream from them. For instance, from

a. eBay (signature in e-mails, ‘about me’)

b. Flickr: submit best images with the description & link, create a user group

c. YouTube (see above)

d. Wikipedia

e. MySpace (profile blende with your website, friends generation, bulletins)

f. Craigslist

That’s it. I think there is something for you to test from the list. Good luck.

[tags]google, traffic generation, ebay, myspace, flickr, wikipedia, youtube, craigslist, ppc, affiliate marketing, yahoo!, msn, alexa, press release, affiliate program, digg, Slashdot, shouwire, ebaumsworld, fark, blogs, blog carnivals[/tags]