Whether you’re affiliate marketing, selling your own products, or monetizing your site with advertising, you need traffic. While there are are countless marketing tactics to draw traffic to your site the number one key element is… you guessed it, content!

People visit websites for content, plain and simple. You can have the best marketing in the world, stacks of inbound links, great PPC campaigns, offline adverts, social networking and all the rest and you will get visitors to your site, but they won’t stay.

What exactly is content?

Content is anything of value which a user would visit your site for. It could be articles, or tutorials. Maybe you have a podcast or downloadable MP3s, browser games, videos, software… The medium isn’t important (although not all mediums are created equal – more on that in a moment!) but what is important is the quality. It’s no good having hundreds of articles or blog posts on a site if none of them are high quality. High quality doesn’t mean that they have to be incredibly well written with perfect grammar and punctuation (although particularly bad grammar and punctuation will put some visitors off), rather the information must be good…

Good is another term that needs defining, since it depends on the type of content, and the target audience. Good for a tutorial would mean informative, well presented information that isn’t available elsewhere. Good for a game would be that it is fun to play. Good for software means that it performs a useful task well, and preferably one that isn’t performed by any other software (or at least for free, or in the same price bracket)

Focus on your audience

It almost goes without saying, but when creating content you need to keep your intended audience in mind. What constitutes quality content is highly subjective. I could write a superb article about accountancy for home office workers, but if most of the visitors to my site are 16 – 18 year olds looking for entertainment that wouldn’t be considered good content… a version of Pacman that allows them to share their highscore with their Facebook friends might be more appropriate!

The purpose of content

Good content will not only attract visitors to your site, it will keep them coming back and, hopefully, get them promoting your site for you! That is the most vital part of the whole puzzle, to have a site packed with so much good content that bloggers link to you, people post messages on social networks about you, that people Digg you and in turn your audience grows. Essentially, create enough good content and your visitors do you r marketing for you!

While this blog is very new, and has yet to establish a solid user base, other sites I have built have gone through this same process. Kwikgames.com was created purely as a portfolio site, a way of ’showing off’ my Flash skills in the hope of attracting web design clients. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that many people would be interested in playing those games – and linking to them. Now, with virtually no input or new content for the past 3 years, the site still attracts around 100,000 unique vistors each month and has over 27,000 backlinks on Yahoo!

That didn’t happen overnight, but is a good indication of why content is so important. I have never advertised Kwikgames, I just put it online and my visitors promoted it for me.

How do I create content, and what medium should I choose?

The medium you choose depends on your niche and target audience, your technical and writing skills, and the time you have available. In general, text based content (blog posts, articles etc.) are more valuable from an SEO perspective than multimedia (audio, video etc.) since search engine spiders are good at reading text, and so far very poor at indexing anything else. However, if you have the tools and skills you might find creating a 30 minute podcast a lot quicker and easier than writing an article of similar content. Additionally, multimedia content can be marketed through other channels (Youtube, iTunes etc.) rather than relying solely on the saerch engines.

As I’ve already stated, the quality of the content is, in general, more important that the medium. Tomorrow I’ll discuss different mediums, and different ways of actually creating content!