How to Create Powerful Content for Your Weekend Website

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In the last two articles in this series we looked at how you can make good money writing your own websites, and the three elements that go into choosing the right topic.

In this article we'll focus on how to develop and write the content for your website.

Step 1. Create an Architecture for Your Site

You are going to be writing many, many pages for your website. So the first thing you need do is create a structure for the pages you will be writing.

The diagram of a website's architecture looks like a family tree. At the top is a single page, the home page. Linked directly from the home page are the second level pages. These are typically the principal categories of the website. Beneath each of these main category pages are the third-level pages.

As an example, on a website devoted to sports, the home page would be about sport. On the second level, one of the category pages would be about motor racing. Beneath that category page would be third level pages focusing on Formula One racing, Indy Car racing, Drag racing, and so on.

How many second and third level pages should there be? There are no rules, but you might want to start out aiming for the home page, ten second level pages and ten third level pages for each of the second level pages. It's like a family tree where everyone has ten children.

That gives you 111 pages in total. And that's about right, because 100 pages is pretty much the minimum number of pages for a content-based website that makes a good passive income.

If that sounds like a lot, don't worry. You don't have to write them all at once. Just work out a structure that makes it easy for your readers to find all the information they want.

Step 2: Apply Keyword Research to Each of the Page Topics and Titles

For the first stage, give your home page and each of the ten second level pages a preliminary title. Draw this out on paper or with a mind-mapping tool.

Now take those preliminary page titles and use a tool like Wordtracker or Google Insights Search to find relevant phrases that have a high demand among readers, but for which there is a relatively low supply of quality web pages in existence.

As an example, you might have written a preliminary title for a second level page on a site about aromatherapy as:

Handmade Essential Oils

But five minutes with Wordtracker will tell you that you'll likely get more search engine traffic if you change the title to:

Hand Blended Essential Fragrance Oils

Go through this process with every page on the site. Optimize every page for the search engines. This ensures that over time you will get a ton of organic search engine traffic coming to your site.

Step 3: Write Useful, Informative Content

Once you have a clean, well organized structure for your site and you know which phrases to use to best optimize each page, it is time to start writing for your readers. While search engine optimization is essential when you want a ton of traffic, your site will ultimately thrive or fail depending on the quality of your content.

Make sure that every page is useful and informative. Write in a way that addresses people's interests and concerns and answers their most frequent questions. For instance, you could answer the question, "Is it safe to use essential oils in face cream?"

In the next article we'll look at how you can start to make money from all these pages of great content you'll be writing.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Nick Usborne is an authority on writing for the web. His site for online writers and copywriters, nickusborne.com, includes dozens of articles and posts on writing web copy and content, plus access to his many books, programs and services.