The web revolves around content: articles, videos, Tweets, Facebook updates, forums, etc.

This post is going to focus on where you should use the main content you’ve created, so I’m going to assume that’s something like an article or a video.

The most important place is your own website…

That should really be your own website – one where you own the domain and pay for the hosting.

Whilst it’s tempting to use free sites such as Weebly and Blogspot, you shouldn’t rely on them for your main internet business. Otherwise you’re laying yourself open to all sorts of potential issues as you’ve relinquished control over this important aspect of your business.

If it’s your own domain, chances are that you’ll be using WordPress to look after the day to day things. It’s a good solution and is cheap or even free if you don’t pay for any premium options (being a cheapskate, I tend to keep to the free side of things whenever possible and that works well for me).

Depending on your preferred WordPress site structure, your content should be added as a page (for pages you want to be readily available from anywhere on your site) or a post (for ongoing information like this post).

There’s no distinction at Google between the two different ways of adding content. It’s more for your own convenience.

Once you’ve added the new content to your own site, there are various other things you can do with it.

Here’s my preferred method at the moment:

• Post on my own site or a site where I’m allowed to post articles such as LinkedIn or my Warrior Forum blog  (I’ll explain why I do this a bit later in this post)
• Copy the article into Microsoft Word, format it and turn it into something that looks like a slide show or PowerPoint presentation. Then upload it to one of the various document sharing sites such as Slideshare or Scribd. I vary between these for no real reason other than I don’t like to be dependent on just one of them.
• Use the Word document as the basis for a video. I start up a screen capture program and read the article. Once it’s rendered, I’ll upload it to YouTube, add a description with links back to my site and then an annotation that also has a link back to my site. If I remember, I also upload the raw words so that YouTube can do a better job of captions than the automated system they use by default.

For me, that’s it.

I move on to the next piece of content or whatever else I’m doing.

Sometimes I’ll also embed the video in a post – I’ll probably do that for this post once I’ve created the video.

One reason I switch between my own site and other sites is traffic.

Much as I’d like to think that this site has authority in Google, that’s not really the case.

Yet.

It takes what seems like forever for Google to put posts into the search results and send traffic.

Whereas LinkedIn, etc. send traffic almost immediately. Not much for any given article but more than zero.

Often more visitors than YouTube or Google, Bing and Yahoo combined.

I could put this article on another site as well as my own site – some successful marketers suggest doing that – but my preference is to create separate unique content for their site.

Part of the reason for doing that is that Google doesn’t always work out the original source of the content.

If the article was written specifically for another site then I don’t care if the source is credited to them or me.

But I would care if it was published here first and then Google decided a republished version was the original.

Maybe that’s just me being paranoid – you need to make your own choice.

My target on creating content is to create one post for my blog (then place it on a document sharing site and turn it into a video) then one article on a different site (also turned into a document and a video). I don’t always manage the extra formats, that depends on time.

I don’t always meet that target and during 2013 the ratio was probably closer to 2 or 3 articles on EzineArticles for every one I placed on my own site.

Update: during 2015 it’s been nearer 75% on my site, 25% elsewhere.

The main “trick” on this is to create content regularly.

If you’d like more help with creating content for your website then check out my content creation crash course.

Here’s the video I created from this post: