Content Creation — Rules of the Road for Creating Your Content

Dear Information Marketers,

Back in my salad days, one of the freelance jobs I took was that of website writer. I created content for a few websites for a number of different businesses. From house siding suppliers to small business real estate firms to logistics information, I created the content for all of these websites, starting with a pen and paper and ending, for some of them, by adding HTML markup for it to be posted online.

Recently a friend asked me to redo the content of his company website. He gave me the URL and told me to take any information I needed from it. The company information was in fact there, but the content appeared to be written by a surrealist author, and was chocked with spelling and grammar errors. When I asked my friend about it he said, “Oh yeah, I just nicked some pages from some other websites and cut and pasted them together”

My heart skipped a few beats. We had to have a chat after that as my mate was a content thief.

Creating your website can be cumbersome, but it can be fun too. So much fun that you do NOT need to steal material from others. You need to be organized, but you can do it yourself.

Here are some techniques I use when doing up websites:

--Create an Outline: Like creating an information product, create a detailed outline of your website. Use a blank page of paper for every page of website content you are going to use. Some pages to consider are: About Us/Me, Mission Statement, Products and/or Services, Order Online, and Contact Us. As a rule of thumb, I create between five and ten pages of content for anyone website, depending on the company size.

--Writer your Content Carefully: You don’t need an MFA in creative writing to write your website content. You do, though, have to be thorough. Give some details about yourself, your company, a brief description of your products, and how people can get a hold of them. That’s it. I write my pages in longhand on scrap paper first, and then type them up later. If you are more computer savvy, feel free to type them up straight off, but be sure to edit them and print them off to see how the content looks.

--Keep Fonts and Letter Sizes Consistent: Put yourself in the viewer’s chair and always think about what you would like to see if you randomly landed on that page during a ‘Net surfing session. Keep your fonts consistent – I always use either Courier or Arial – and keep the letter sizes readable and attractive to your viewer.

--Have Graphics for your Products: For the E-Wealth Daily website, we took the graphic files of our product covers and compiled them on our Products page with a brief description of each. If you have graphic files for your products, do the same. It will look attractive to the viewer.

--Do NOT Plagiarize: People say that the Internet is so vast there can’t possible be people out to police it. Hogwash. A recent documentary I watched on a news program revealed that companies will hire detective-like personnel to scan suspect websites to see if plagiarism has occurred. If another entrepreneur suspects you have taken content from their site, you could risk serious legal penalties, and they might have a very good legal team. When in doubt, write it fresh. If that’s an issue, hire a copywriter. Either way, it’ll save a lot of potential hassle.


Websites were designed for information marketing. You are writing your own products right? If you can do that, you can writer your own content. It does not take too long, can help you test your creative juices, and is something you can show to people what a serious entrepreneur you really are.

More to come, so stay tuned!

Best,

J.