How Farmers Can Help You Increase Traffic and Sales 

As I was driving my son to school last week I saw a bunch of corn stalks for sale at a roadside farm stand.

I wondered who the heck would buy corn stalks.

By Monday morning they were nearly all gone.

Like farmers, online marketers need to give their content a life cycle if they want to maximize profits.

If we look at the farmers plan, we can easily apply it to our web based business…

When the corn grew tall enough, the farmer cleared a trail maze and wisely charged families to walk through his corn maze.

Then he harvested the corn and sold some of it.

He used some to feed his livestock.

He saved some to plant next years crop.

And yes, he then sold the stalks.

I know nothing about growing corn. My business is information. But I have a system that maximizes the profit my information yields. Today I’ll show it to you so you can maximize the profits from your content.

Great content is the cornerstone of many successful web businesses. Whether you’re writing the content yourself or buying it from ghost writers, you need to go way beyond  just “write and post” if you want the real profits online.

Here’s an overview of the content life cycle I put in place, that has enabled me to make my living online since 1996…

1. I write an article.

If you’re not comfortable with writing, you can use ghost writers nowadays and get great content for about $5 per article. Your content must original, informative, thorough, well written, and helpful to a specific audience. Content like that is what the web revolves around. Each article needs to be at least 500 words, but preferably closer to twice that long.

2. Add it to my site as a page or post.

Search engines love original content and usually give priority to the first place that content appears. Publishing solid content regularly, gets you better search engine ranking than having a static site.

3. Share it with subscribers.

I do this via an email broadcast to my email list members. You can include the content in the email or simply send them to the URL where you’ve posted the content. When you share great content with your audience regularly, you built trust and rapport.

4. Share it with other publishers.

A week after publishing the content at my site, I share the content with other sites to get more readers and backlinks. There are lots of ways to do this.

You can offer it to publishers in your niche by personally emailing them. You can use syndication software and tools. You can use article submission tools such as Unique Article Wizard. And you can even outsource the task of sharing your content at Fiverr.

No matter how you do it, be sure to include a link in the article that goes back to your site. That will help you get more visitors and better search engine ranking.

5. Convert to ebook for giveaway.

Another think I like to do with my articles is convert a handful of them into a small ebook. Then I can give it away as an incentive to get people to subscribe to my email subscriber list.

Creating an ebook yourself is simple using the freely available OpenOffice Writer program. You just paste in your best articles, organize it so it flows well, and then click File, Export as PDF. You can then get an ecover made for you at fiverr.com. Add the ecover to your site with a signup form that takes folks to the PDF and you’re done.

6. Create products to sell.

Once my content arsenal grows large enough, I convert a large portion of it into a product to sell. This takes a little more time, as you need to organize the content properly and make it into a product with real value. Sometimes you need to convert text to audio and video, and add more content. These are tasks you can easily outsource. While creating products to sell can be time consuming, it is worth the time. It can significantly increase your annual income if you do it once per year.

7. Sell the rights.

Once I’ve built up a large collection of articles, ebooks or other valuable content, I sometimes put together collections and sell limited rights to the content. This allows other publishers in the niche to give it away or sell it as their own. This is usually the final stage of your content’s life cycle, sort of like selling the corn stalks, but a lot more profitable.

As you can see, your content can go a long way online if you plan it out correctly. If you’re just writing and posting you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

If you’d like to learn more ways I turn content into cash, watch my video here.