Your website is only as successful as the number of viewers you get. Without any visitors to your web page, it’s essentially useless because you aren’t getting much attention which is one of the primary focuses of your website.
By driving user interaction and getting plenty of clicks, you increase the amount of exposure your business gets and, as a result, you increase your profits.
It’s a simple concept and it’s backed by very simple ideas that come together to form your digital marketing strategy. However, something that’s often misunderstood or underrepresented in the world of online media is the concept of original content.
You may have encountered a few SEO-related articles that briefly mention original content and the effect it has on your SEO strategy, but it goes much deeper than that.
Original content does help with SEO, there’s no denying that, but it has a noticeable effect on your visitors and not just your search ranking. In this article, we’ll be exploring several ways which you can use original content to drive web traffic, increase exposure, and ultimately grow your business.
Unleashing creativity
According to Netcraft, there are currently over a billion websites on the internet. This includes many abandoned websites, websites that are hidden from plain sight and of course, the regular websites that you browse every day.
With so many websites on the web, it can be extremely difficult trying to find the information that you need, and it’s unlikely that every single website has a lot of original content. Copycats and plagiarists will always exist and it’s difficult trying to weed out every single one.
Google’s search ranking algorithm does incorporate some form of copy protection and will blacklist websites that are blatantly stealing content from other websites, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect and it will often fail to detect some forms of plagiarism.
This is why creativity is required in creating a website that stands out. Not only do you have to make a website that is filled with original content and ideas, but the website itself needs to be more than just a simple template that’s being used for hundreds or even thousands of other websites.
But how can you achieve this? There are plenty of unique internet marketing businesses such as Pod Digital that can help you plan your entire digital marketing strategy. They can handle everything from branding to web design, to consultancy, SEO and even social media. It’s essentially a turnkey solution that will benefit busy company owners that are looking to get a good start in the digital realm.
However, if you’d prefer to get your hands dirty or if you don’t have the money to recruit freelancers and digital marketing companies, then you can just as easily work on original content by yourself as long as you understand what it implies and how to get ideas.
Creativity is something that everyone inherently has—it’s just a matter of finding an outlet to tap into that creativity and training your skills so that you can turn your ideas into reality.
What counts as original?
Original content is created from unique ideas. However, not everything about an idea has to be entirely original, and there’s even a saying that nothing we do is original anymore. This is because our ideas are created from inspiration and imitating other ideas.
We have to create derivatives of existing content in order to create new ideas, and those new ideas can be inspired by fields or activities that have nothing to do with websites or business.
For instance, top 10 lists are a common trope among content creators on the internet. The original derivatives changed the number, giving us top 5 lists, top 7, top 20, and so on.
For all intents and purposes, that can be considered original assuming that the listed items are not exactly the same and placed in the same order—that would be trying to hide plagiarism.
The next derivative was to change the “top” word, leading us to article names such as “Five Best x” or “The 10 Worst Y”. These new articles can also be considered original despite how similar they are to the original “top 10 list”.
This is one of the misconceptions that many people have when they say they aren’t creative. Creativity isn’t about pulling ideas out of thin air, it’s about creating a derivative of something that already exists and is popular and mixing it with other ideas.
As mentioned before, those ideas don’t have to stem from just web content, businesses or even your chosen industry. Mixing and matching these ideas is the source of creativity, and if you expose yourself to a lot of content, you’ll ultimately have more ideas to add to the mixer.
1 comment
“Creativity isn’t about pulling ideas out of thin air, it’s about creating a derivative of something that already exists and is popular and mixing it with other ideas.” I agree with that. But on the other end, the process you describe might not retain more prospects on your site than doing ‘original’ content such as case study about your customers, tutorial about a product etc.
The top-x lists are, for sure, a good starting point.
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