If you want your web page to stand the test of time, then create real content!

The last few years have been an interesting time in Internet Affiliate Marketing. Like the Wild West, there were few rules and those who moved the quickest could profit quickly and sizable returns. But things are changing. The Search Engines are getting smarter and the days of automated content generators are numbered.

I know that there are several search engines out there, Yahoo, MSN, etc, but Google is the only one that really matters for sheer numbers. A year ago, google search results were getting worse and worse. It was filled with spam. I'm sure that if you were searching for an answer to some problem and were using Google, that you've seen the useless pages. Basically, the title of the page would be the exact string that you were searching for and the remainder of the page would be affiliate links with no useful information present.

Google has gone through several updates. These updates were called Jagger and Big Daddy (and that's just the last 8 or 9 months). I think that you'd agree that Google results are now much improved over a year ago. What's missing? All the spam. The Spam pages were created by various tools that could automatically create thousands of pages. Basically, you feed them a list of keywords, which may have been collected from MetaSpy or Wordtracker and they create thousands of pages based upon those keywords. Some of the page generation scripts would do a search engine scrapes of the keywords and place the results on your pages. Really little more than stealing someone else's content.

This method has worked for a few years, but is becoming less and less effective daily. If you use these methods, then I'm sure you're seeing your affiliate commissions shrink as you lose positions in Google. Frankly, I'm sick of this constant warfare and electronic countermeasures! If you keep using these strategies, then you'll be buying / learning / implementing / abandoning page generation software for years to come. Yes, it's expensive, but it's also very time consuming and time is one resource that you can never recover.

So what is the solution? I think it is to create web pages with real, useful content. Not just scraped results. And you can keep many of the tools that you may have purchased over the years to keep your web pages fresh.

Getting the real content is the tricky part. How do you do this without hiring an army of writers? There are several cost effective methods.

1) Get content from Article sites. These articles are mostly of good quality and the rights to republish them are implied. You can manually search for articles at sites like Article Center, Easy Articles, GoArticles, etc. There are literally hundreds of these sites. You can also use tools like Article Miner. Article Miner actually creates a database of articles from about 20 article sites on your PC and lets you search locally. Then it automates the process of creating web pages from the articles from templates that you design. It's one of my favorite tools.

2) Write Once and create multiple version. You can use tools like WebSpinner to take content that you write and turn it into hundreds of articles that say the same thing but with synonomized words, sentences, even paragraphs. WebSpinner is a very powerful tool for those who want to write once and create tons of unique and useful content.

3) Pay someone to write for you. Now don't be scared away by this method. You can find someone locally I'm sure, but when I need articles written, I use Elance.com. Having articles written is super easy. You post a request to have 1 or more articles written about a particular subject and within an hour, you'll have responses from many people who will write for you. I generally pay about $5.00 per article using Elance.com and the authors have all impressed me. You get to choose who is going to do the work for you and you can generally get a look at their work before you buy from them. Elance also has a Feedback system similar to ebay's, so you can purchase without fear. I've also has custom software written (like my Clickbank Quickviewer application).

4) A method that I have never used, but which I've heard others using, is to use public domain material. I won't go into detail on how to determine if a book is in the public domain, but you can find thousands of them on the Project Gutenberg web page. Here's a link to their Copyright How-to page that describes how you can know if a book is in the public domain. Now, before you discount this method, check out this page called, The Illustrated History of the Roman Empire. I was blown away by the concept of this page. Is it a huge money maker? Probably not. But I bet it earns a few bucks each day and only had to be set up once. How many old books about the Roman empire could you find that are in the public domain and which could be turned into a multi-page web site with ads in a hurry? The subjects are too numerous to mention. I found this page while doing some bible study research on Google, so their placement is good. Their Google PR is 6. Not bad.

Wrapping up, I think from this point and going forward, you should not be looking at 'quick fix' tools that generate thousands of pages of garbage. While these tools may work in the short term, you will be facing a constant battle with the search engines to keep your content within their indexes. Instead, you should focus on creating web sites that have real content. You don't need 10,000 page web sites when you have pages that actually get read and used. 100 good pages are better than 10,000 pages any day.

Here's to a profitable day!

Charles Waters jumped into the world of Internet Affiliate Marketing in 2003 and has never looked back. Today, his flagship website is The Affiliates Home, a meeting place for other Internet affiliate marketers.