Short Term Content

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I spoke about long term content in the first article in this series. Now I am going to talk about short term content, which again strangely enough is content which will have a value only for a short period of time. Personally I draw the line between long and short term at one year. If you expect the content to be valid for less than one year, in my book that’s short term.

News and Current Events

A excellent example of short term content is news or current events. The most valuable time for a news item is when it’s new or fresh. Once it’s gotten around and everyone knows it, well it’s no longer “news”. Being discovered or credited with a news item first is a definite plus.

Trends and Fads

This is another good example of short term content. Trends and fads generally have a slightly longer life span than news items, but are still short term. They may last a few weeks or even a few months, but usually not much longer. Think of things like fall fashion trends, crazy frog or American Idol. In the rare case where there is an extremely successful marketing effort is behind a fad, it could last for years, but these are the rule not the exception (think Pokemon).

Blogs and Blogging

While a blog website may have a long lifespan, the individual posts, unless of exceptional quality, are usually short term content. In fact the chronological nature of the publishing or content management system of a blog make it very well suited for this type of application.

Tips for Short Term Content

Something many people may not realize is, that short term content can often turn out to be more work than creating long term content. If you try to maintain a regular schedule with frequent in depth postings it will take a lot of time, effort, and or manpower. This is something you should definitely be aware of. Try to find a posting schedule or rhythm that matches your readers habits, try writing your posts ahead of time, or try being less formal and going into less detail. Do not try to emulate a major magazine unless you have the staff, you will burn yourself out, trust me on this one. Remember most frequent blog like postings are less than 250 words. One advantage of frequent short term postings are that you will develop a large amount of content very quickly. The downside is much of it loses importance fairly quickly.

Search Engines and Spiders

One tip to keep in mind with short term content is don’t post more frequently than the search engine spiders can keep up with. If the spiders only come by once every 3 to 4 weeks, posting once a day is going to cause major indexing problems, more about this in putting a content based website together (coming soon).

• Long Term Content

• Short Term Content
• Website Informational Pages
• Advertising on Content Based Websites
• Putting a Content Based Website Together

tags: (search engine optimization | seo | sem | search engine marketing )

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