Content is King

Ignoring content will be to your detriment.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Yes, I write a lot. I blog 6 days a week, plus my podcast and my fiction works. I probably write on the order of 3000 words a day. Six days a week that’s 18,000 words a week. For the sake of argument, let’s decrease that to 15,000 words a week. Which, in a year, amounts to 780,000 words total. That’s a lot of words (far more than in the English language as a whole).

However, these many, many words aren’t worth a damn towards my brand as an author if they never see the light of day. Which means content.

Content takes a lot of forms. The obvious is books. A book with zero content is a blank journal. Awesome for filling with content, but otherwise a blank canvas.

A website with zero content is non-existent. Or just a page with some form of “under construction” or the like upon it.

You can build a website and then leave it out there for the world to find, see, and explore. But — without updating content regularly it becomes just as obscure as an actor who hasn’t been seen on stage, screen, or film in 25 years.

As a brand, to be seen and appear in searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the like — content is king. That means updating webpages, writing blogs, and keeping the content fresh and ongoing.

Website creation and maintenance

There are a LOT of tools available to you for creating and maintaining a website. Two of the biggest are WordPress and Squarespace. Both of these offer free templates that are fairly easy to use and work on altering so that you can build your presence online.

But once you leave the basics, this gets more complicated. You can do a lot to create an amazing website, but you can also create some pretty impressive garbage, too.

Like anything you write, words matter. If your grammar is crap and you don’t get to your point, nobody’s going to explore your page. What’s more, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly — anyone who reaches it via tablet or phone will run from it rather than explore it.

Like with blogging, search engine optimization (SEO) matters. Fortunately, if you don’t know the current (and ever-changing) SEO rules, there are…