The web thrives on content – Google’s appetite for new content is insatiable and it rabidly crawls and indexes content on an exceptionally regular basis.

That means you need to create content – lots of it – on a regular basis if you want to compete and start earning money on the internet.

If you don’t, you’ll get lost amidst all the people who are creating more content, more regularly, than you. It really is that simple.

There are various different types of content:

• Written
• Audio
• Video
• Images
• Software

And all of those have their place.

Unless you’re a graphics or coding whiz, audio and video are probably the easiest to produce.

Audio is especially easy – most phones have a built in recorder.

Video isn’t much more difficult with programs like Screencast-o-matic.

• Closely followed by written content – you can create that by typing away at a keyboard, getting your computer to transcribe your words or paying someone to do the transcription.
• Apple systems have a dictation option.
• Windows has a speech to text program built in (but, weirdly, not activated by default)
• Or you can buy a program like Dragon Naturally Speaking if you prefer.

Speech to text is quite a mind-leap and you may find that it slows you down initially while you learn how it works. I certainly found that it slowed me down having to tell a computer when to add in a comma or a line break rather than just instinctively hitting the appropriate key. But if I’d stuck with it then maybe I’d have got better. Or maybe my habit of listening to music while I’m creating content would have got in the way.

Either way, that means that you may be better off trialling it with one of the free options before splashing out for a piece of software like Dragon.

Or you may prefer to use someone on a site like Fiverr to do your transcription.

That has the advantage that you don’t have to learn how to break up your spoken text into sentences and paragraphs.

But the disadvantage that turnaround time can be several days and obviously there’s a cost factor each time you get an audio transcribed.

Ultimately it’s your choice – I’d suggest dipping your toe in the water first if you want to go down the speech to text route.

Machine transcription is also available – YouTube offer it – but the technology hasn’t really caught up with the wide variety of accents so it’s patchy at best.

But if you’ve got time on your hands some of the guesses that YouTube makes can be quite funny and you could probably use them as content for your own website.

If you create videos or audios it’s best to include written copy alongside them.

Even YouTube – which is a video search engine – likes words to help it categorise things better and a longer description with your video will typically help it to rank better.

Videos can be moving pictures – taken with your phone or a camera.

Or they can be slide shows – created with a software program or using the built-in tools in YouTube.

Or they can be slide shows like this one – typed out in Libre Office (a free alternative to Microsoft Office) and “filmed” with a program like Camtasia or Screencast-o-matic.

Audios can be purpose-recorded or they can be the soundtrack from your video, stripped out using a free program like VLC.

You can record audios on your phone – sites like SoundCloud have an app that helps you do that and upload your recording as a podcast.

Or you can use a free program such as Audacity that will give you almost as much control as you’d expect in a recording studio.

Written text can be typed directly into WordPress or you can type it into a program like Word first and then copy & paste it into WordPress.

Using a program like Word means that you can use the built-in spelling and grammar checkers although some browsers will highlight words that aren’t spelled correctly.

Word normally makes quite a few changes to the text you type in to make it look prettier.

I turn off curly quotes and long hyphens because they often don’t translate when they’re copied.

Or you can use the paste as text option in WordPress but chances are you’ll lose any formatting such as bold, bullet points, etc. when you do that.

Personally, I just type directly into WordPress when I’m writing a post or into the YouTube description box or wherever else I’m writing.

It’s reasonably rare for computers to lose all the work you’ve done but if you’re on a poor connection or just generally don’t trust computers then make a habit of writing in a program like Word and saving your work regularly.

How much content to create?

The short answer is lots!

Gone are the days where a 250 word or even a 500 word article cuts it in anything but the least competitive niches.

On my blog, I aim for upwards of 1,000 words per post and even that is on the lower end of things nowadays.

I’m gradually training myself to write longer posts and the aim is to get closer to 2,000 words per post soon.

In some of the forums and Facebook groups I’m in, the suggestion is between 1,700 and 2,500 words per post.

Terry Kyle did some analysis of various high ranking pages in Google and found that for most of them, every single page in the top 10 results had over 2,000 words and that there was a strong correlation between word count and page position.

He found that the pages with the most words usually came higher up the results.
If you find the idea of writing 2,000 words daunting, split it up.

Think of it as 4 articles, each of around 500 words, combined into one long article.

Split the page up with headings and bullet points and maybe pictures.

That makes it less intimidating for your blog readers.

Personally I use short – often one sentence – paragraphs to give lots of white space on the page.

WikiHow uses images with short descriptions below each picture.

It also often has a summary plus bullet points and other information further down the page to increase the word count without distracting people from the main solution.

Develop your own preferred style but I think that lots of short paragraphs plus headings and bullets works nicely.

Above all, get into a routine.

Whether it’s one new piece of content daily (or even more often) or if it’s less often than that.

But make it a routine that you develop into a habit.

Persist!

Because, over time, you’ll create a library of content that makes your website bigger and better than most of your competition.

It’s what all the large websites have done – Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.

OK, you probably won’t have the millions of pages that those sites have got.

But over time you’ll have created tens and then hundreds and eventually thousands of pages of content.

And that content will give Google more chance to find your pages and send more visitors to you.

Start small and build up.

Get into a routine.

Type or record for, say, 30 to 60 minutes. Then give yourself a short break or – if that’s all the time you can spare at the moment – come back to it later today or some time tomorrow.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised how fast things build up and just how much content you can begin to create to help push your internet marketing further, faster.

If you’d like more help and ideas for creating content, click this link.