Content Writing Guide: KickstartMonday

Welcome to the 3rd edition of our Gaffg KickstartMonday series where where we help to start your week off on the right foot. You can find all of our KickstartMonday series here. In this edition of #KickstartMonday we focus creating content where this is essentially our Content Writing Guide. In this article we feature the following:

• Content Research
• Content Writing Ideas List
• Video Content
• Scheduling your content
• Is your Content Converting? Track it with Google Analytics
• Content Writing Tools & Apps
• Shorts News Weekly Summary
• WagerOn: New affiliate program
• Genesys Affiliates: Featured affiliate program
• Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins: What I'm listening to this week
• NSFW Banned Commercials: This week's LOLorWTF

Content Research

If you don't have a content strategy and guide, then you might want to create one. But before you do, it helps to get organized and you will want to do some research as well to make sure you are not overlooking anything. So here is a short list of ideas and resources to help you with content research.

1. Use Google: Just type in a keyword and see what content is ranking and read that content. If they are on the first page for that keyword that might be a chance the content is fairly good and you'll understand what standard you'll have to live up to. One final tip is to pay attention to the other websites that rank for some content, you'll find that not everything will exist on a standalone website and sometimes it can be on another social media site like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more.
2. Check your competition: If you know whom your competitors are then have a look at what they do. At what rate are they producing content and how is the content quality?
3. Content idea generators: There are plenty of them available but you don't need them all. If you can't come up with any ideas then use this content generator tool which uses Google Docs and made by the people at builtvisible.com.
4. Google Keyword Research: This has been moved into Adwords to try to get you pay for traffic. https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Our content writing ideas list should give you more ideas if the research part isn't helping you.

Content Writing Ideas List

We'll get right to the point on this and give you a list of ideas for writing and creating content.

• Series Posts: This article is part of a series posts, all about #KickstartMonday.
• How to Post: These topics are endless and are easy to convert you user, a few ideas like how to launch a website with Wordpress or how to deposit with Neteller. Many people search for these very questions, your how to posts make it easier to help them.
• List Post: This doesn't have to be a blog post but could be a page. Lists are always useful to people so give them what they want like a list of email service providers for webmasters or a list of casinos taking players from the United Kingdom.
• Interview Post: These are fun, fairly easy to do and benefit the person you are interviewing as well giving them a platform to talk about themselves. We do it often here at Gaffg.
• Review Posts: You can have your regular reviews but you can do it as a post as well.
• Video: Content isn't just about writing, you can possibly get more value out of making videos and in many industries people just don't do enough of it for many reasons like not knowing how to produce a quality video, not taking the time to make one or if it comes to involving themselves in a video just not having good presentation skills.

If you look at your competitors you might see many of these examples in place. Video is probably the final frontier for content and despite having all the tools and resources to make videos, this is something that many webmasters don't take the time to do.

Video Content

I'll admit at Gaffg we are slow on videos but when you look at the entire online gaming industry, not enough people are doing videos and there are many reasons why but sometimes it can come down to inexperience, lacking the resources or just not getting the maximum value out of them. You have plenty of ways of producing a video from screencasting to using your cell phone.

Scheduling Your Content

If you are responsible for writing and creating your content, then it can help to schedule your content and there are many ways of doing it. This is also one reason for starting the KickstartMonday series which forces me to always create an article that is ready for Monday. You can schedule your content anyway you want and having a daily, weekly or monthly task can put pressure on you to deliver. Some tips from Graeme from AffiliateBible.com are to write it all down on your whiteboard and to stay on top of it, never let the content escape you so you know when you need to produce articles. My last tips on the subject with scheduling is after reading a few books on topics related to productivity and getting things done (GTD) is that putting pressure on yourself for a schedule can be a successful means of achieving this. If you look at some successful companies, many of them have their business model revolved around this concept especially event based companies, they have deadlines. This is probably the biggest problem any webmaster has is not having to answer to an alarm clock or a boss but at the end of the day your website needs more content and good content to succeed and this is your responsibility.

Is your Content Converting? Track it with Google Analytics

You really should be checking Google Analytics more for conversion where most view it as feedback on SEO. Whether you are writing blog content or any other pages, you'll want to look at the time on site of those pages, bounce rates and exit rates. If you have too high of a bounce rate then it could mean either your content is low quality or that the navigation and user interface is poorly laid out and causing a leak in traffic, or rather lack in conversions. Some people say blog posts have an average bounce rate of 60% which is probably accurate for many sites but no matter what that number is, there usually is a way to make it lower. The questions you need to ask yourself is if the content is good enough or if you have done enough to help keep the user on the site for more time and go to more pages without simply leaving. Use Analytics to find out what your users are doing and come up with a strategy to keep them on your site for even longer and finding more useful content. So in short if you want more users spending time on the site and less of them leaving, focus on quality. Remember at the end of your articles to give the users something to do and more articles to click on.

Content Writing Tools & Apps

Aside from the good ole pen and paper or your basic editor, there are some apps and writing tools that can help you with producing more content and quality content. So here are some apps that should make your job easier:

• Evernote: You can take notes anytime on any device.
• Google Docs: Just write articles anywhere you want
• Dropbox: If you are not using this then there is something wrong with you. For about $100/year you get 1TB of storage.
• Dragon Speech Recognition Software: Instead of typing, just say it and let Dragon software automatically produce it as text for you.
• Camtasia Screencasting Software: Make videos easily and upload to YouTube.
• Odesk.com: Ok if you don't want to write any of this good content yourself and want to outsource it, find someone on Odesk.

My personal favourite is pen and paper, always have it handy. Pen courtesy of BetVictor.

Short News Weekly Summary

Our Gaffg short news section gives a snapshot of bits of news that might matter to you covering a range of categories from player promotions, affiliate promotions, SEO, conversion and other marketing news and online gambling industry news. Here is a summary of the past week of short news:

• Club Gold Partners abruptly switches casino software
• Google cuts authorship

WagerOn: New Affiliate Program

WagerOn, the new gambling affiliate program for Ocean Reef Casino and 2 others. The sites are in English and powered by Real Time Gaming software. Commission Rate: 40% Revenue Share, $100 to $200 CPA Affiliate Payment Methods: Check, Player account Target Markets & languages: English License: Curacao Program Features: Ocean Reef Casino, Royal Lady Casino, Jackpot Jungle

Genesys Affiliates: Featured Affiliate Program

Genesys Affiliates features 5 quality online casinos with unique 3D games. They have helpful affiliate managers and the program has been improving year after year. Commission Rate: 25% to 35% Revenue Share Affiliate Payment Methods: Neteller, Skrill, Bank wire, Player Account, check Target Markets & Languages: English License: Curacao Program Features: Mandarin Palace, Treasure Mile Casino, Grand Eagle Casino, Lucky Creek Casino, Wizbet Casino

Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins: I'm Listening to

Some music I like to listen to while I work and share.

NSFW Banned Commercials: This week's LOLorWTF

Welcome to our LOLorWTF segment. You can follow #LOLorWTF on Twitter if you are bored and just want to find more of these. This week is all about #NSFW. Since this post is all about content writing, one more funny service to share is Write or Die which sounds intruiging and it should be. This program aims to "kill" writers block and it has a painful consequence. If you start writing and you hit writers block, the program has a timer and if you don't complete your task in a certain amount of time due to either writers block or procrasting, then your work is deleted!

Share or Comment Now!

Join the discussion below and give us your thoughts on this article, if you want to read more KickstartMonday articles then click here. If you think someone else would like to read this article then like or share it. If you have ideas you want to share for future articles just contact us and it would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime may our KickStartMonday help get your week started on the right foot. Have a productive week!