All the authors who publish on the subject of building websites for online income seem to focus on keyword research as the optimal starting point. They may be correct, although I find writing about subjects which I know about and am interested in works better for me. The keywords come automatically if you know the subject you are writing about.
I recently found a WordPress plugin that will automate the whole process of building a website from a keyword list. You give the plugin a list of keywords and it generates posts by reaching out to places like Amazon and Ebay and pulling products and product descriptions and formatting them to fit your template. The plugin will even randomize the publication dates of the generated posts to make it look like they were developed over time. Obviously, this kind of process will let you build sites much faster than you could ever do writing original content. If you elect not to use such an automated system, lots of others will, so this is your competition. I can see several possible responses:
- Use the system without change. This will maximize the number of sites/pages you can produce quickly. It also has the largest potential for duplicate content penalties. It will work best on popular products.
- Add some of your own content. By adding your own unique content to some pages you make the site look more like an information website . This is where some authors would use a content spinner to pull material from an article site and "spin" it into a multitude of "unique" pages as their "content".
- Develop your own content. Some people do this by actually writing their own material. Others outsource content development. Still others start with PLR(Private Label Rights) articles and use them directly or spin them into a new arrangement.
I have always written my own content. I like learning about new things and like to have websites with substance. However, as I was writing this post, I started to wonder if my reasons for writing my own material are competitive any more.
We no longer build websites for other people because there is no money in it. The skills needed to build a decent site, which is all most people want, continue to come down. We ourselves have moved many site to Weebly. They have a drag and drop website builder which makes it quick and easy to build sites with no technical knowledge at all. For those of us with some site design experience building new sites is REALLY fast.
I think the same trend is coming to the world of online income generation sites. The WordPress platform is everywhere, easy to set up, and the plugins keep getting better. I'm thinking I should look into ways to use some of these automated tools to facilitate the site building process. In other words, save the custom writing for specific needs, but take advantage of the automated software to do some of the heavy lifting.
There will always be a place for custom websites with custom content. However, I think the percentage of sites built that way will decrease. A few people can still afford to hire an architect and build a custom. Many more people can afford a tract home with a few custom touches. I suspect websites are the same thing.
