Attack Of The Zombie Copy!
Erin Kissane said it best, "As you can see, the scourge is upon us, and we must, every one of us, be prepared to fight". Erin was referring to the various drivel that is printed and produced online. Cory Doctorow had another term for it: Metacrap.
Well, there is something to be said for rotten content. Time Magazine recently reported, in its January 30, 2012 issue, there are one-trillion page views per year on YouTube.com; that translates into 4-billion page views per day. That's a great deal of junk TV watching.
Imagine having complete control of your content and getting a slice of the ad-spend pie! Online advertising spending will surpass traditional print and television media in 2012, according to estimates published by eMarketer.com. With tens of billions of dollars available, planning quality content streams now can put one in a position to handle long-term ad trends online.
IT STARTS WITH DOMAINS AND SEARCH
Of course, quality copy will always matter to the search engines. Google, which happens to own YouTube, is always refining its algorithms to filter out less than desireable content, irrelevant content, duplicate material and the like. This means sites that might rank near the top of a search will be quicky targeted for a human eyeball to make certain they are not simply stamping out "Zombie Copy", brainless chunks of text or pictures that rank high today and are gone tomorrow.
For domain developers, this means making certain to utilize a quality content development strategy, and that may or may not mean using content development services. The reason? Some of the biggest content development firms, such as Demand Media, don't turn out what ranks as quality copy. It's snippets. Snippets are hardly original content.
On the other hand, look at Wikipedia.org. Nothing created by content development companies looking for short term gains.
In short, long-term content strategy online will always matter for those developing domains. Sometimes that will mean setting up news feeds and blog feeds. Other times it means identifying niche content streams that will target specific users that, heretofore, have not been identified.
THE TURNPIKEINFO.COM EXAMPLE
We'll take the example of TurnpikeInfo.com. Here's a domain name that was hand-registered at the end of 2008. Putting relevant travel content on the site and watching the traffic grow organically yeilded results. The domain is easy enough to remember, and because the content is relevant and keyword rich, today nearly 8,000 visits per month are logged.
WHAT THIS MEANS TO YOU
Of all the investment strategies online, content can be the most quixotic. It is a difficult nut to crack. Technology companies are easy to identify and quantify, and domain names are easy enough to spot, particularly for their raw real estate value. So going forward with content development, as a furtherance of a domain investment strategy, requires a long-term vision.
Typically, applying multiple content types across multiple feeds is the best strategy, and that brings us to networks.
