Creating quality content for your website, social media, or other platforms is crucial if you want to stand out online these days. It’s your content that attracts people to your brand in the first place. And that very same content that will keep them coming back for more. Without it, you risk going unnoticed, missing out on potential opportunities for new connections and generating income.
That’s why it’s so important to invest in writers who are experienced and highly skilled, allowing them to effortlessly create content that will position your brand as an authority in its field.
But the question is, where do you find writers who genuinely know what they’re doing and have a passion for expertly crafting irresistible content? We know that it takes a lot of time to find, hire, and train writers – that’s where Express Writers fits in.
Read on to dive into the history of Express Writers. We’ll cover how long we’ve been in business and how many orders we’ve completed successfully, as well as how we help businesses of all sizes.
A Brief Express Writers History
At Express Writers, our team is committed to providing our clients with only the best content. It’s been our primary mission since our founding in 2011. In that time, we’ve served over 5,000 clients and completed more than 40,000 projects.
Our team is remotely located throughout the United States, and we’re always growing. That means we have all the necessary resources to tackle your projects and not only meet, but exceed, your needs for high-quality content. Plus, you can rest easy knowing that we hire writers based on their industry experience, allowing us to handpick the writer that’s best for your project.
If you’d like to learn about a few of the core members making up our team (and put faces to their names), visit our About Us page to check out their bios.
A Look at Our Best-Selling Services
Now that you know a bit about our impressive Express Writers history, let’s talk about some of our top services. This will give you an idea of the services we offer and can help you see how our writers can transform your content.
Four Content Levels, Based on Your Needs
Brands are looking for different things when they come to the Express Writers team. That’s why we created a model for customizable content to match our clients’ unique needs with their exact vision. As a result, we created four content levels so there’s something for every budget.
Here’s a quick overview of what Express Writers has to offer:
General, Expert, Specialist, and Authority Content: These are our four different content levels.
You can expect quality content at every level, but which you choose depends on your needs. For example, General Blogs do not receive editing, while higher levels do. And for technical industries, you’ll want to choose specialty content.
Contract-Free Model: You’re never locked into any kind of contract when working with our team. That means you can order content whenever you need without being tied into a specific number of pieces.
Managed Agency Service: We provide content at scale for agencies looking for a team to handle high-volume projects. You can be hands-off as our team tackles all the writing and editing.
Our team expertly crafts blog posts, web pages, press releases, ebooks, and more. Just check out what one of our past clients had to say about working with us:
“We use Express Writers as an agency for some of our client content projects, including emails, ebooks, white papers, and blog posts. They have it all. High quality, valuable prices, great service, and all the content offerings you could want in an agency!”
For Quality Content, Trust Express Writers
With over 11 years of solid experience, our team of writers knows how to help you best. We have expert writers with the knowledge and skills to develop content that will attract your target audience and keep them coming back for more. Instead of managing content creation by yourself, outsource it to our team for maximum ROI.
Curious how we can help you? Contact us today to discuss your new project.
There’s no doubt about it — creating great, shareable, audience-pleasing, profitable content is a skill.
Like a five-star chef in a farm-to-table Austin restaurant, the best content creators serve up content so delicious, so crave-able, that their customers (and search engines) keep coming back for more.
And yet, there’s an ongoing argument among today’s content marketers on exactly how this happens.
Is it the high-quality content that gets the rave reviews or is it serving up mounds of the stuff, fast and quick, that gets results?
As always, we’ve dug deep into our resources and curated the answer for you.
Let’s start with the age-old debate starter — the quantity of content. I’ll shed some fact-based light on this topic and give you a dose of content quality vs. quantity reality. Hang with me!
[bctt tweet=”In this Write Blog, @JuliaEMcCoy explores the ‘age-old’ debate of quality vs. quantity content, and how to correctly think of both and get real results from your #contentmarketing efforts. ” username=”ExpWriters”]
What’s Up With ‘Quantity?’: How You Should Be Thinking to Achieve Successful Content in Terms of Regularity and Consistency
Okay, so part one of our content success recipe deals with the quantity of content you’re providing.
Fact: no one wants to spend time — and money — in a restaurant to get a morsel of food so small you need to slap on your reading glasses just to see it on the plate.
The quantity, or rather consistency, of your content truly does apply to the bottom-line success of content.
For one, you want your visitors to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth when they stop by your site. Your content isn’t only hot and ready — there’s plenty of it to whet their appetites.
For another, Google rewards sites with more content.
Hubspot has done studies showing that the quantity of content is most certainly, definitely, beyond-a-doubt tied into your overall success.
We found that the more blog posts companies published in total, the more inbound traffic they got to their website. You’ll notice the tipping point happened around 400 total blog posts: Companies that had published 401+ blog posts in total got about twice as much traffic as companies that published 301 – 400 blog posts.
[bctt tweet=”In a @hubspot study of over 13k bloggers, it was found that after the 400 published blog mark, bloggers start seeing 2x as much traffic. #quantityvsquality” username=”ExpWriters”]
And, they found that bloggers that publish more content per month consistently see far more inbound traffic.
I can’t stress it enough — if you want to see success from your content, you must have regularity. Successful content is not a shot in the dark. It’s content produced on a consistent schedule, maintained with creativity and evolution over time.
So, don’t think of it as quantity – think of it as consistency.
Consistent content builds the traffic and the audience that you want to achieve.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to see success from your content, you must have regularity. Successful content is not a shot in the dark. It’s content produced on a consistent schedule. @JuliaEMcCoy #contentmarketingtruths” username=”ExpWriters”]
At Express Writers, we get 80,000-100,000 unique visitors every month on the basis of our high-quality content alone. Why? Because we’re known for publishing good content consistently. Never once in 8 years have I never published a blog in a week (and that doesn’t mean I’m a content slavedriver, that just means I’m ahead all the time and I’ve got my process down).
We publish one main long-form piece on the Write Blog every Tuesday, with custom-made CTAs and graphics.
We promote this post to our list in email and with a retargeting campaign on Facebook.
We publish regularly to our other blogs such as the monthly #ContentWritingChat recap, video recap, event recaps/lessons learned blogs.
We publish 2 videos/month on YouTube with transcripts on the Write Blog.
We’ve stockpiled over 1,100 published blogs on the Write Blog to date.
Every month, I go back and update 1-3 old Write Blogs out of our 1,000+ with new images, copy, and meta. This has caused many of them to shoot higher in SERPs AND add more conversion value from their rankings
One other point — and I can’t stress this enough — is that we never sacrifice quality for quantity, especially now that we’ve grown to 80k+ visitors every month. We can (and must) afford to stop and focus on quality.
3 Ways to Make Sure Your Long-Form Content Is Still Readable
Here are some ways to ensure your long-form content leaves your visitors wanting more.
1. Make It Skimmable
Long-form content is important for search engine rankings. In fact, content length is directly related to your placement in search results:
However, people’s attention spans are about the length of a goldfish’s (8 seconds), so people are becoming more selective in what they choose to pay attention to.
To make your content appealing, make sure it has lots of sub-headlines and bullet-pointed lists (like we do in this article) to make it simple for readers to skim through and get straight to the “meat” of the information you’re providing. Add in lead magnets that people can download for more information.
2. Make It Diverse
When you walk into your favorite restaurant you can rely on having choices. Readers hitting your website want that same kind of smorgasbord when it comes to content.
Variety is indeed the spice of life — and it’s also a critical element in generating lots of content that can cover everything your audience could possibly want to know about your area of expertise.
The key is to create tons of content that cover every aspect of a topic, and a great way to do that is to create topic clusters.
Answer the Public is a fantastic tool you can use to create solid topic clusters to keep that content flowing. Here’s what came up when I plugged in “Restaurants.”
Once you’ve got some topics, don’t forget to link them together so visitors can hop from sub-topic to sub-topic without leaving your site.
3. Keep It Coming, Buffet-Style
There’s a reason buffet-style, all-you-can-eat restaurants are so popular. They give hungry customers access to a continuous stream of food choices. Your website needs to take a page from the Golden Corral and provide content on a reliable — and continual — basis.
It’ll pay off. How do I know? We’ve already mentioned the Hubspot study that showed companies that posted 16+ times a month got 3.5 times more traffic.
I’ve got something better: Express Writers’ own success. My company gets 99% of its ranking power from our high-quality, high-volume content.
Quality + Quantity = Your Recipe for Success
I’m going to share my guaranteed recipe for content marketing victory right from my own kitchen: the Express Writers’ proprietary mix of content wizardry.
As I mentioned above, Express Writers grabs its ranking power from high-quality, high-volume content. To see how this has played out over the years, check out this snapshot from my second year of business:
Not bad, but not where I wanted to be. So, I added content strategy, which included focusing on thought-leadership-level content that is published consistently and frequently.
Ta-da! Look at those amazing results! The recipe is so simple that anyone can follow it:
Mix a dollop of high-level, thought-leadership-style content with a rigorous schedule of consistent, high-volume content posting. Serve up to all website visitors. Repeat.
The Secret Sauce: Quality Content
Have you ever heard anyone say, “I wish I could find more low-quality food in restaurants?” Of course not. No one wishes for low-quality anything in their lives, and that goes double when it comes to content.
Double, because you’re not just serving this content to your visitors — you’re serving it to search engines. Google makes it clear that they won’t tolerated poorly done, copied content on websites. If you’ve got duplicate stuff on your site, they’re gonna hit you right in the SERPs.
If you’ve got low-quality content created by bots, re-posted (with permission or not) articles, or by cheap content writing labor, the same rules apply.
So, how do you cook up quality content that attracts fans and turns Google’s algorithms to your favor? Follow along and see!
4 Ways to Balance Quality In Your Content & Truly Stand Out
1. Set Yourself Apart
You’re not some low-budget chain restaurant serving up the same menu as the guy next door.
To truly set yourself apart, you need to determine what your Content Differentiation Factor (CDF) is. Hint: it’s completely different from a unique selling proposition (USP).
In a nutshell, you’ll let people know how your brand stands out from the crowd by using content to show how you can help them achieve some goal that no one else can.
2. Start at the Top
Headlines are your first point of contact with readers, so make them count. As Copyblogger notes, 80% of people will mull over your headlines, but only 20% will muddle through the rest of your copy.
That means you need to put 80% of your creativity up front and center with headlines that hook — and reel in — your target audience.
3. Action = Attraction
People are visiting your site to discover something new and — this is key — employ it in their own lives.
Give the people what they crave by providing actionable techniques that are easy to follow.
Here’s an example of an actionable infographic in keeping with our food theme (and the fact that summer is looming on the horizon).
With step-by-step instructions and a recipe to boot, this infographic gives readers everything they need to impress guests at their next fiesta.
You can do the same with infographics, videos, or even simple instructions that speak to your niche.
4. Add a Splash of Interest
Everyone digests information in their own unique way. Some get their taste buds tweaked by awesome graphics; others salivate at the sight of a dynamic video; some find fun quizzes and surveys more to their taste.
At Express Writers, we serve a generous helping of content that touches on many learning styles to reinforce our message. We use video (two per month), podcasts, online chats, infographics, and more to cover the varied tastes of our target audience.
The Secret Sauce is in Balancing Both Regularity and Quality of Content
Once you’ve figured out how to prepare content your audience craves, simply be consistent and reliable in serving it to them.
If you do it right, you’ll become their favorite content destination. As with their favorite restaurant, you’ll find them coming back for more, again and again, recommending you to their friends, and hanging out waiting for new items to pop onto your menu.
There’s an incredible truth when it comes to the written word and ecommerce – a simple piece of content can mean thousands of dollars for your company. That’s right, just a handful of expertly crafted ecommerce web copy pieces will benefit your company with more revenue than you thought possible. You keep reading the 10 Reasons Why Content Is Important blog postings, but now it is time to look at a few case studies showing just how important content is. Nothing can beat a real time example or two.
Introduction to Brafton
Maybe you’ve heard about Brafton; they are a great content marketing resource that we use for many of our blogs. They provide great information and expert tips on how to get your brand out there effectively and awesomely. Their long slogan is, “Brafton fuels your brand with smart strategies and excellent content” and their shorter, easier to remember slogan is simply, “Fuel your brand.” Gives a decent image of what they do, doesn’t it?
The workers at Brafton started out crafting content for major businesses a decade ago and once the Internet search market began to grow, so did their business. Why? Because the sites they wrote for ended up listing high in the results. This made everyone want to use them and made them become a leader in the content marketing realm. They are a priceless resource that can teach you many useful marketing tricks.
Let’s Take A Look At One of Brafton’s Clients
Brafton works with an ecommerce company that sells trendy footwear in New York City. They started crafting short blogs for the company and publishing large images to connect with the company’s client base. Eventually, this company decided to make different landing pages for their most popular shoes: Nike and Jordan shoes. Unfortunately, the landing pages lacked keywords and other written content, meaning the company lacked site visits and orders.
When Colin, a Brafton employee, ran an organic search utilizing the keyword “Jordan Shoes” he realized that the company’s competitors were ranking 3rd and 4th on the SERP, which led to 11 percent and 8 percent total clicks (respectively). That is a lot of clicks and revenue for those companies and Brafton’s client was missing out. Colin pointed this out to his client and showed that even if they ranked 5th, the company would have approximately 15 clicks per month at a conversion rate of .0122. The average order value of $117.52 was calculated showing that the company was missing out on $21,506 a month in revenue. At first, the numbers seemed small, but it totaled up into a significant sum! This company was losing approximately a quarter million a year because of their lack of written content.
After implementing a few keywords, the Jordan shoes landing page is now generating 172 visits from organic search results and moved from ranking at 114th on the Google SERP to 25th. Are you starting to see just how important content is?
Now, Let’s Take A Look At One Of Our Own Clients
One of our clients is another great example of how content will help bring in more revenue amounting to thousands of dollars. Our client has a very niche ecommerce shop that only focuses on one product, getting rid of grey hair. This is definitely a market many people are interested in and there are many different shops out there, making it top priority to get our client noticed. Our client began by requesting three to five posted blogs from us with a wide selection of keywords to use (over 200). We focused on SEO for each blog, attempting to make each one stand out and make our client a leader in their field.
Our client reported to us how much success they had seen since requesting our services in mid-2013 towards late 2013 and the results are incredible. The report helped us to pinpoint the hot button topics for this client’s site, which helped us begin narrowing down the keywords for future blog postings. We also learned that we should adapt one specific voice style for all postings. We are using this information and are now posting weekly blogs using hot button keywords with that specific, consistent voice.
The report also showed that just one of our blogs, just one, brought in over $800 in revenue for our client! Other blogs brought in anywhere from $70 to $200. While those numbers might seem small, over the course of a year that number will be very significant, especially when you combine it with the $800 revenue.
When writing these successful posts, we made sure to write on hot topics within the community and wrote in a manner that spoke to our client’s customers. We always make sure that all of our blog posts end with a very clear call to action. This really helped bring in that revenue for the client.
Our client is very happy with the results and is continuing to see amazing growth in their niche market. The next step we are taking with them to help promote their store further is by having them set up a Google+ account to establish authorship. We are excited to see what the future holds for this company and how much more revenue they will begin to bring in once they switch to utilizing Google authorship.
See, Content Really Is Important
Now you can see that the power of one blog can really impact your revenue and can create a successful business. You no longer have to rely on what you read in blogs – you have actual proof of how content will bring about success. You need to start taking content creation, including ecommerce web copy, seriously and begin crafting content that is both high quality and optimized for the search engines. Once you have done this, you will begin to see your business become incredibly successful and you will be grateful you decided to dedicate time and money into your content marketing. Get ready to see some excellent results and maybe do your own case study!
By now, you’ve probably read (skimmed, noticed, you-name-it, we know you saw it…*insert wink face*) all our articles about how to create compelling content and are well on your way to changing your 2014 content strategy.
As you make your changes, you are probably wondering if content truly is that important and if you will see any changes within your company. Well, we can tell you that it really is important and you will begin to see amazing changes soon. This article will discuss a few of the benefits you can expect when you begin to publish quality content.
First, Let’s Start with a Little Testimony From Our Books. At Express Writers, we truly know what good content means and the power of content that’s not just written for rankings. We upgraded our content campaign in 2013, invested some of our best writers in writing our content campaigns, utilized tools like editorial calendars, planned out seasonal topics, and switched from keyword focus to reader, tone, voice, structure and research. It was a big switch, and it has boosted our return by over 200%. Google ranks our posts better–even though they are NOT centered around keywords; we have received more connections, followers, and subscribers for our published content (from newsletter campaigns to guest blog RSS) than we ever have before; and people like what they read and are more quick to look to our team for their own quality content. It’s the truth: investing in your content–putting real elbow grease and investment–will bring you return.
Now that you have read our little testimonial, it is time to look at changes you will see once you start publishing your quality and fascinating content:
1. You Will Make and Save Money
Once you begin to write and publish your stellar content for the world to see, you will begin to see something amazing in your budget and bank account. How so? Well, by writing quality content, you will not have to spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing campaigns. This may not seem true at first, especially if you hire a copywriter; but look at it as a whole:
Is what you are spending on the copywriter for a handful of pieces more or less, than how much you spent on other forms of continual advertising?
You do not have to pay the copywriter continually in order to use their work; once they’ve finished it, it is yours for good.
You will find that paying a copywriter to create great copy will save you money in the long run. You don’t have to keep paying a copywriter in order to use the content they created for you and, in fact, you are able to reuse and make your own changes to the material when you are ready for a change. Quality content will bring in more money from sales as your generic advertisement route will not cut it anymore; sales are relying heavily on content marketing. Once you have made the change, you will begin to reap the benefits financially, which is pretty exciting if you ask us!
2. It Saves Time
Yes, it does! Once you have your content written, you are done with your content marketing campaign. You do not have to keep going back to make changes to fit with seasons or focus on advertisement campaigns that will not bring in the revenue your business needs. By creating great e-newsletter content, great PRs, web content, and blogs, you will find that you have more time to focus on getting to know your customers and working to keep them as part of your business for a long time. Compelling content saves you from having constantly to change a content strategy that isn’t working anymore. This is why we say quality is of the upmost importance. Don’t slack off.
3. Become the Authority in Your Field
By publishing consistent, compelling content, you will be deemed an authority in your product or service area. People are more willing to trust someone who writes consistently and knowledgeably; Google will rank you higher the more you publish with their Google Authorship if your blogs are published frequently and with high quality. You will find more people trusting you as a source over your competitors and this will bring in more customers or more people looking to you for information. You may even find that competitors will come to you as a resource, trying to learn from the compelling content sensei you’ve become.
4. Traffic + Comments
Simply put, quality content increases the traffic to your site. People are not going to share your site if it is drab and filled with uninteresting content. Do not spend all your time focusing on whether or not your keywords are perfect; spice up your content and make it readable. Intriguing, readable content will guarantee more shares on social media and this is how the traffic will increase to and around your site. The more traffic, the better ranked you will become. In addition, it will just feel great to look at your statistics and see the traffic numbers rocketing from minimal to viral in a snap! Comments on your blog postings are another great benefit of writing fascinating content. Readers and customers will be more willing to discuss information with a business that is open minded and knowledgeable.
5. Customer Interest and Support
Quality, compelling content will help you create a great customer base of interested clientele. According to Social Media Today, customers are more willing to support the business if the business’s content is exciting and from the heart, they will share any information regarding the business with colleagues, family, and friends. People will even share it on their social media platform, helping to increase the audience your business wants to reach.
There are many other ways in which gripping content helps with customers such as:
Learning More About Your Customers. Customers who are truly interested in your product due to your content will give you great ideas on how to tweak services provided. You will find customers to be more willing to give you tips and tricks on how to beat the competition as well as telling you what they expect from your company. Customers are your best resource when it comes to slamming the competition. Because of this, you will be able to gain useful information that will prove effective when setting up winning strategies.
Creating Lasting Relationships with Customers. If you continually post great information and content, customers will stay with you and stay in contact for a long time. They will be committed to your business and will prove to be great forms of advertisement when they know of someone who is looking for a business such as yours. Do not forget that quality content is absolutely necessary when it comes to customer relations.
Bringing in New and Unexpected Customers. You may be surprised when one day you begin to realize you are reaching customers you did not expect to reach. That is a huge benefit of quality content. A wider range of people will notice content that is captivating and you will be able to create interest in more diverse companies or communities. Reaching different groups will be great for your business and be another advertisement point when people begin researching your services.
6. Your Designers Will Thank You
Designers are great at making an awesome looking website and creating something that works wonderfully, but many are not up to the task of creating content. You may think it is part of what they do, but designers will tell you that they would rather design than write. Hiring a copywriter to write compelling content will take all that stress and worry off your designers and you will find that their productivity is greater than before. They no longer have to worry about writing content thus making them more apt to stay with your business and not burn out. You will also find that you are able to recruit great employees. Stellar writers and designers will not apply to a business with boring content, but if your site looks inviting and is written in an engaging manner, you will begin to see professional people taking interest in working for or with your business. Having great employees will help your business become highly successful.
7. Your Competition Will Start Losing to You
Guess what? Fascinating content will help you beat your competition into the ground! That very real struggle of trying to win will become easier the more you publish great material. Customers and search engines will take notice that your information is more interesting and valuable than your competitors, leaving your competitors in the dust. They may be focusing too much on what kind of content to publish or using antiquated methods of outreach, giving you a great opportunity to outshine them, so start creating interesting content and keep creating it! Take a lesson from what your competitors are doing and tweak it to make it a tremendous success for you.
8. You Will Go Viral
Achievement unlocked! Quality, compelling content is the key to going viral. Think about the kind of content you share on your social media site. Is it fascinating? Is the quality amazing? You should be writing the kind of content you would share on your personal social media site. If you write something you would never share, the likelihood that others won’t share it is high. As we keep saying, do not slack off when it comes to writing your content. Your unique, captivating content will help you stand out in the overabundance of articles and web copy out there. By having a unique style and “voice” you will find that more of your content will go viral after the initial viral post. Your blog and site will gain new readers each and every time you go viral. Soon, you will be doing that happy dance of achievement as your posts continue to be viewed by hundreds of people, all because those posts are quality, unique, and sound like you.
9. Great Content Grows with Technology
Technology will never outgrow quality content; that much is clear from Google’s new algorithms. Your compelling material will grow with the available technology and you can use content you already have by implementing any changes that come out from Google or other search engines. You will find that your content will always be excellent and able to be used at any time. That is one of the great things about creating great web content – you can reuse it! Sometimes, all you will have to do is make minor tweaks and edits. Of course, it is always great to refresh your material so it does not always sound the same, but it is easy to use existing content on your site and rewrite it in a new and compelling way. This saves you significant amounts of time and money.
10. You Will Maintain Your Reputation
Have your products and services received high marks from customers? Yes? That’s fantastic! Now, you want to keep those high marks and show potential clients that you are as great as the reviews say. Quality content does just that, it shows potential clients that those high marks are not just from your mom and a few friends. Great content makes you look professional and knowledgeable, leading to a lasting good reputation and more sales for your business. Your reputation will plummet if you post boring material, start writing that great content and keep your already excellent reputation.
You Will Reap Many Benefits When You Use Compelling Content!
The benefits of quality content marketing will tremendously help your business generate more leads, make more revenue, and become an authority in your field. People will flock from all over to a site that has expertly crafted content and are more than willing to offer support to companies. By focusing strongly on great content, your business will boom, and as we said in the beginning go from boo to woo quickly!
Hyperlinks are easily one of the most important tools on the Internet. Linking to credible sites that back your site up may give your words a little more heft in the eyes of readers. Getting linked to by a legitimate website is a great way to get new viewers (and if that site is a business you look up to then you might get a little ego massage).
For users hyperlinks are even more important. They are the basis of search engines. Without search engines the Internet simply comes to a halt. We’d even venture a guess and say that most of the people reading this right now found this blog post from a hyperlink, not by typing in the website.
Not only are hyperlinks indisputably important, many people (users especially) consider them innocuous. Most people don’t even consider them as possible copyright infringements.
“Wait, wait…” we hear some of you saying, “Did you just say hyperlinks are ‘possible copyright infringement’?” Yes we did. For those of you who haven’t heard, there have been cases going back to the late 90s about whether or not hyperlinking was considered copyright infringement and, depending on the type of use, some of them were ruled one way, some the other way.
There are Types of Hyperlinks?
Indeed there are. It’s not just underlined text that you click on. The types of hyperlinks are defined largely by the things the users can’t see. Regular links, like this one that links back to our home page, has been protected repeatedly. Honestly, most of the time regular links do not come under question at all. Most of the disputes you’ll see in courts are regarding deep linking or inline linking.
Deep linking links into the site somewhere. The main difference between the two (because neither search engine rankings or HTTP sees it as any different) is that it’s avoiding a lot of the site that you may not care about. Rather than forcing the user to go through the home page and search through the site, you can just link them directly to what they were searching for in the first place. It’s the difference between taking the subway from one building to another building versus driving through the city yourself.
Inline linking is when you use an “<img src=” tag to link one page to another page. It can be useful for visual cues (as opposed to linking through a description) as well as image search engines.
Copyright Laws and Linking
Deep Linking
Deep linking is a huge deal to some businesses for a few reasons. One of the main qualms that companies have with deep linking is that it can bypass advertisers and some sites even consider it a trespass (as if you were breaking and entering into someone’s house). In Ticketmaster v. Microsoft a judge ruled that Microsoft’s site Tickets.com did not infringe upon any copyrights when deep linking into the Ticketmaster website and that bringing users to relevant content was more useful than harmful.
On the other hand, in eBay v. Bidder’s Edge, Inc. it was argued that Bidder’s Edge’s (which is a weird possessive noun to type, by the way) deep linking to eBay was actually detrimental to eBay, according to Linuxinsider.com. Have you ever seen a celebrity get hounded by reporters and paparazzi after a scandal? They hop in the back of their car and it gets swarmed by photographers and microphones to the point where they have a hard time moving? That’s what Bidder’s Edge did to eBay, but with search bots instead of paparazzi. The court ruled that, in this case, the hyperlinks were actually a detriment to eBay and slowing them down. Just think, if they had used a captcha then the entire case may have been completely different. These two cases essentially set the precedent that hyperlinks could be used with impunity as long as it didn’t directly hurt the site (even if the link bypassed some possible advertising revenue).
Inline Linking
There are a few cases related to inline linking, but the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier, end-all-be-all, case which all other inline linking cases will be brought back to is Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. Contrary to the idea that the name of the case might give you, Amazon doesn’t matter in this discussion. What matters is another company that Perfect 10 was trying to sue in the same case: Google. The court ruled that Google’s inline linking to their images was not an infringement of hyperlinks copyright because a copy of the image was not made and stored on Google’s servers (whereas when Google does cache a page then sites have the right to have it removed by contacting Google). The court basically set the line where the FBI warning at the beginning of movies does. It’s fine to watch a DVD with a friend but it’s a crime to copy the DVD and give it to your friend.
The European Union’s Decision
Recently the European Union decided on a case originating in Sweden regarding whether or not hyperlinks infringe on copyrights. This case is slightly different than any American case due to the way the laws work in the EU. In the EU the rights holders and producers have exclusive rights on how their works are made public.
The case originated when a site called Retriever Sverige (an aggregator site like Google News or the Flipboard app) began linking to published articles on the Göteborgs-Posten website in a way that may have implied that the content was that of Retriever Sverige. This caused two questions to be raised:
Does hyperlinking constitute communication with the public?
Can a site link even if there may be confusion about who is providing the content?
The EU ruled that hyperlinks can be used without permission and in any way that the linker desires without the permission of the linked site. The only exceptions to this rule was if either the linker charged for the linked site’s free content or if the hyperlinks circumvented a pay site’s registration (although they could link to a place that redirected to a registration page).
Lessons to Learn About Content Production
1. Use Your Own Content
Hyperlinking and referencing are, in the vast majority of cases, not going to be a problem but the best way to avoid it altogether is to have people link to your top-quality, authoritative content rather than you having to link out to anyone else.
This doesn’t just mean that you’re wording other articles in a different way either. After all, you don’t want a Vanilla Ice vs. Queen/David Bowie situation on your hands. Be sure that when you’re making your blog posts or web content that you’re providing your own spin or analysis because people go to sites for original web content and according to Kissmetrics.com, repetitive content will hurt your rankings. And, even worse, if you’re just using a competitor’s ideas then your potential customers will wonder why they’re not just going to the company with the real ideas.
2. Content Farms Are Bad
While you want to avoid plagiarizing other companies it’s important to make sure that your site is worth plagiarizing. If you look at your site at the end of the day and think, “If this wasn’t my site, and I was an unsavory rapscallion, I would be tempted to steal this content” then you’ve done something right.
Content farms are a vaguely defined concept but it’s best to do all that you can to avoid being called one. They are full of original content that has absolutely no substance or quality control whatsoever. You may be thinking to yourself that sites like YouTube can be, in a way, considered a content farm due to the fact that it lets anyone upload videos and content without much restriction.
While it’s true and YouTube does allow anyone to upload at any time there is quality control at play. There is a view counter (that is analyzed at 301 views to determine if the views are legitimate), ranking systems, and a host of other ways that they subdue useless content, promote quality content, and have directed content based on related views. They also have a habit of promoting fresh content rather than allowing any content to be promoted at any given time. This allows for a very democratic content farm where people with interesting ideas or presentations can succeed while people who are simply recycling content are usually blocked from getting too far.
As many updates to Google algorithms have been aimed (implicitly) at content farms there seems to be little or no reason to make one at all anymore. In fact, penalized content farms can hurt other businesses by making a legitimate site become associated with penalized sites.
3. How to Use Links
Because hyperlinking can be subject to costly, and just painful, litigation processes it’s important to know how hyperlinks can work for you and how they will get either hit with PageRank penalties or get hit with complaints from other sites.
The Good – Good hyperlinks to and from your site count as votes for PageRank algorithms and are essentially rewards for quality original content. They are a good pat on the back but they will also allow you to quickly gain more visitors without having to resort to shady, or copyright infringing, tactics.
Legitimate hyperlinks, in and out, can also be helpful because they can help readers and search engines be able to categorize your site. Without this help you may just be lost in the shuffle of random, uncategorized sites, which won’t help your links at all. Although linking excessively or irresponsibly may be considered bad form and may incur penalties, it likely won’t be seen as illegal.
The Bad – Let’s talk about link farming. Unlike content farming, link farming is a fairly well defined idea. Essentially, it is when a company buys up several domain names and puts up fake “content” to provide links to their central site. Although this isn’t illegal it will easily get hit with penalties for low quality content and fake links.
4. “Free” Linked Content Costs You Control
If you’re looking for ways to have content with very little work then you’re out of luck. And if you think that simply linking to other sites is a free way to get rankings then you’ve never heard the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Providing quality original web content to your visitors will allow you to set your own pace and create serial content that will keep visitors coming back for more. If you just grab links then you have no control over the quality of the content or how it is distributed. And having all kinds of articles from disparate sources from across the Internet may become confusing and make you seem unreliable.
Quality content is the food of your website. It fuels you. And if you cook it just right you may have the best steak and lobster meal in the world. If you’re just grasping around the Internet then you’ll just end up with jelly beans and broccoli stuffed in a duck. In other words, you’ll have an incongruous mess on your hands.
Another aspect of your site that you lose control over is the all important call to action, according to Rightmixmarketing.com. Sure there’s a call to action but it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. And it’s quite likely that the point of your site isn’t to advertise for other companies so you may as well have your own call to action. You’re not a billboard, don’t act like one.
The How-To Guide to Original Content
If we’ve convinced you that original content is better than shamelessly hyperlinking around the Internet and risking (sometimes) frivolous lawsuits then that’s great. But now you have another problem: how do you create original content? Lucky for you there are plenty of ways to go it alone and have others do it for you. In the latter case, just remember that you get what you pay for and if you’re outsourcing to other countries to write content (even English speaking countries) you may find that you have some serious editing to do to fit it into your regional dialect and make it sound natural for your market.
Rewrite the Site
They call them “fixer-uppers” for a reason. They can be fixed up and salvaged. If you like the heart and soul of your landing pages or blogs then there’s no reason that you can’t hire a good writer or editor to make sure that your site conveys the message you want to send in the best possible way.
Guest on Other Sites
Your original content doesn’t have to only be on your site. It just has to be your original content. Speaking of content syndication, don’t shy away from being the one paid to guest blog or write somewhere else. Just make sure that you’re getting links back to your site.
Figure Out What’s Popular
Original content doesn’t mean anything if it’s not content that visitors want. Finding out what your specific market is into, what they’re talking about, and what they’re reading will allow you to stay one step ahead of the game and have links coming to you instead of hyperlinks going outward.
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