How do you come up with content for your site? Through sorting through popular trends and news and what your visitors tell you by what they type in to find your site.
It’s all in the stats and what your users are typing in to get to your site–you just need to expand the terms their finding your site for. Moreover, keep up with the latest trends and news that about your site or area. Business 2.0 has an article out about this very thing. Keep up with the pulse of your niche and find offbeat articles or stories that will grab people’s attention and you can piggy back some of the popularity of this topic. It might be a new movie coming out, a book, or a new feature of a site that people might not know about. Look over press releases, Google News, Digg, and other sites for the most popular articles. Seek out stats, records, first times, best times, highest scores, records, surprises, struggles, and stories that make headlines for your vertical. Does this touch on yellow journalism? No, you’re more looking for topics that you as the expert, your site as the expert, can post and inform your visitors and get traffic. Add your angle on the news. Why it’s important or what about it that’s interesting.
We all crave or want to be part of a team and contribute. Have our skills or something we’ve done respected, acknowledged, and appreciated. Then there’s doing things like serving your country. This must be the epitome of being part of a team. What I was interested in is how it’s so important to have something you do receive some applause. This could just be a simple thanks or money.
But, we work to earn money and live, yes, of course, but we work to receive thanks and respect. A homeless person needs food and shelter but they also need something to do. A place to start off and then build up to something they can gain and receive respect for. How can I jump from serving in Iraq to a homeless person? Along with this idea of having something to do that gives you a feeling of pride, is having a place to go where you feel comfortable, part of a team, where a space where you can create or do something that earns respect–write, create art, music and so on.
Many soldiers come back and then return back to the war they were just fighting in. Amazingly, they don’t want to leave their friends and other soldiers. I think this is related to doing something we’re afraid of, and once we do it, we feel proud and happy that we did it. Maybe it’s finding something to do that challenges us on a regular basis. I always think of doctors, and their immediate impact on others. When someone is sick they are desperate for help, and may die if they don’t get it. I guess what I’m getting at is how do we find that something we like to do that receives applause, helps others and therefore makes us feel better, and also challenges us. I think I could link back to a few other posts that take about his, finding your passion and the viral articles that move people.
Then there’s fame and how that can destroy people in a way or overwhelm them. But is the greatest feeling proportional to the number of people you can effect or move. I’m rambling on and straying to a number of different things but I think that something can be said about doing a lot of different things, learning more in general, and then also having a passion or something your obsessed with and do that.
Why doesn’t a search engine locate the section of the page where the ‘word’ your searching for is listed–jump down to the words or section of the page where what your searching for is listed? Sometimes a page might not actually be relevent for the term your searching for, but that’s the page that comes up–define those pages so they do. As a marketer, as you scan your stats, those are areas of your site that you can expand or better define. Someone might search for a specific nutition fact and find your site randomly, a good reason to grow that section and offering on nutrition.
Could lie detector tests become some sort of directed machine that’s used to gauge the sincerity of a video of a politician let’s say. We are all good at judging whether something is real or genuine, are gut tells us. But, what if there was a way to gauge the vibrations in a voice, the emotion let’s say, and rank of speeches or performances. Along with most viewed, most emailed, there would be most real.
What gets the goose bumps going in someone when they see an actor put on a great performance or a powerful speech by a President? When have you heard one recently? Certainly, in film, it’s the collage of stimuli that creates the powerful emotional feeling. It’s not just the actors words but the music and images and story that creates the emotion. So it’s not so simple I guess but interesting.
I think search and tools on the web will become even more exacting and in a way simplified. We’ll have to scroll through less and less junk and will find more precisely what we’re looking for, whether it’s genuine or not.
Aggregate data and become an expert in the area your site is focused on. Timeliness is huge, be the first to post or break a story. Take a story or a piece of data (stats and numbers) and offer a new slant or add to the angle of the story–further enhance the story with more details and insight. Make your pages small pieces of art, with photos, videos, numbers, drawings, graphs, tools, that prove a theory or tell a story. Well, definetly tell a story, that’s what it’s all about.
Here’s my post on taking it slow. As we rush around it’s easy to get focused on what we have to do or need to get done. I had a teacher who would say, ‘be happy for anything you can do on any given day’. Rings more true when you injury yourself say playing soccer and can’t go out and do what you usuallly do. But I think it’s a good phrase to keep in mind as we rush to and from work. Be easy on yourself and be thankful for what you’ve got but at the same time seize opportunities.
Kindness in words creates confidence,
kindness in thinking creates profoundness,
kindness in feeling creates love.
- Lao Tzu