Content – the lifeblood of EVERY online business! Part 1 (of 4)
What is “Happy”? – Two Different Online Business Models.
In general, anyone who owns a business that is “doing business” online will operate in a manner that will fall into one of two categories
The first option is for them to engage in some kind of “virtual” business, in which all (or almost all) transactions, advertising, etc. will be done online. As is often advertised as an asset of this type of business, there will be no physical offices or business premises, no inventory to store or deliver, etc.
In fact, and probably most confusingly, sometimes there seems to be a lack of “product”!
This is quite common when, for example, the “product” is some kind of online marketing system, which is marketed and sold online using, well, itself!
In other words, a marketing system sells you a marketing system (thus proving that it works!) and then sells the same system to someone else, and so on.
It’s a bit of a cliché, but nonetheless true, that things change online very quickly. If you or I have an idea, we can post it on the online marketplace tomorrow, if we decide to.
So while it may seem strange to buy something as intangible as a marketing system, it can still be of great value as it has the potential to bring the latest and greatest ideas to your PC in an instant.
Information products represent another example of almost entirely intangible products that nevertheless sell well on the Internet. Examples might be a “how to” website, say, crochet or whitewater rafting or website design or the best way to make a chocolate cake. They are all totally intangible, but they are still in high demand, which means they are also very profitable.
More information on the simplest method of creating such products for profit can be found on my site [http://www.hiddentrafficgenerator.com/short.html].
Still with it? Well!
Now the other type of business is going to be a “real world” business that probably sells an actual tangible product, something that can be touched, smelled, seen. It can be gadgets, jumbo jets, hairnets, submarines, you name it, and the business in question has probably used the power of the web to expand the original localized marketing efforts to reach the entire world.
They still market locally “offline” and their online efforts are a complement to these efforts, not a replacement.
This very broad sweep would probably cover 95% of the business that is done on or through the Internet every day.
However, even coming from two such separate poles, both business models depend on content to be successful or not.
So what exactly is content?
Content: a definition (or two!)
As this title suggests, there are effectively two different ways of defining “content”.
One way would be to try to establish exactly what it is, so let’s try that first.
Content is “stuff”! It’s the “stuff” you see every day on the internet…
Now clearly that’s not really a big help.
It is an indication rather than a definition.
The problem is that, in these terms, it’s not at all easy to state anything concise enough to be a definition, so let’s move on to definition method two, which is actually much more useful.
That is, what does “content” do, and, as we shall see, the answer to this goes a long way toward clearing up the ambiguity created by our definition of “things.”
Content is anything you have on your website that gives your visitor or customer the information they are looking for or when they visit our site.
So it can be factual information, such as a product description, a catalog, or pricing information for the jumbo jet you’re selling.
It can be less factual and more of an opinion, like a learned discourse of where humanity is headed in the next 500 years.
It can be an article like this, part factual and part opinion.
“Content” isn’t just written, either, and more and more, online audio and video are becoming more and more prominent on the web.
To summarize, content is any information you have on your website about your business and products, in whatever form this information takes.
Content is what brings visitors to your site, it’s what drives “traffic” to your home page. In turn, the content and driven traffic you create is what makes your business money, it’s the engine behind every penny of profit you make online.
Which makes the content a bit important, I’m sure you’ll agree…
Coming up in part 2, where to find and how to create great content.