Content is the life blood of your site. Nothing else really matters. Get the content right, an visitors will come to you, you will get known, and you will succeed.
- Write for your visitors - not promotion for yourself. Yes, be clear about what you can do for people. No - don’t go on about it. Publish useful, interesting, and entertaining content for your users.
- Never, never write marketing spiel on the web. Visitors are ruthless and will swiftly move on.
- If you are a newsy site - publish often, add your own take, invite comment.
- If you are more or a timeless site, think in terms of building a resource - like a section of a library - people will come to you for what… Poems? Recipes? Fashion-tips? Stock-Picking? Medical Advice? Pictures of Pedigree Poodles? Build up your resource over time.
- Divide your content into no more than 6 main categories - And then start making sub-categories under them. This should keep you on-topic.
- Break up your thoughts into lists and short paragraphs. People scan web pages, and are put off by solid blocks of text.
- Don’t copy and paste from other sites. There’s no point. You will never outrank the original for more than a day or so - and then you will be tagged as rubbish by the search engines and by users.
- Be friendly and informal, and always courteous even when you disagree with somebody. The web is about making friends.
- Write as if you were talking to a friend - this helps bring out your personality.
- Work in bits of your life to help you find your own voice. You don’t have to lay your soul bare, but you can give a little bit of yourself away.

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