At the end of the 90s, research forecasts of online retail sales were aiming for a modest $15 billion by the end of 2003. Compare that with recent figures from Forrester Research indicating that online retail sales in the US alone reached $175 billion in 2007, up 21% from $144.6 billion in 2006. And what’s more, despite a predicted slowdown as the industry matures, it will still add on approximately $30 billion in revenue every year for the next five years.

Unfortunately, online marketing doesn’t come in a pre-packaged kit with friendly do-it-yourself instructions. There is only one really important rule for online marketing: the best content that’s most accessible earns the most, which is why a content management problem is one of the most serious obstacles to a revenue-generating online presence.

What a good Web site can do for your business

The business benefits of a good corporate or sales Web site are pretty much old hat now. But considering how many organizations ignore these basic principles, it would do well to go over them again:

Reach more people

It’s the one advantage that has made the Internet the best thing since sliced bread: time and space become irrelevant. Thus, your Web site is able to reach out to many more customers than your brick-and-mortar store ever could. This becomes particularly relevant when you consider that 210 million Americans alone went online in 2007, and by 2012, over 1.2 billion people are slated to go online.

The online-offline connection

The returns from an online presence shouldn’t always be measured only in terms of online sales. As one study discovered, 51 % of customers surveyed researched products online before buying them offline. Thus, the study pegs the dollar value of offline sales influenced by online research to rise from $400 billion to $1 trillion in the next five years.

Lead generation and branding

Two key measures of an effective Web site is how many leads it generates and how much it helps build a brand image. Consider the results of a survey by Forrester Research: 42.1% of respondents felt that online marketing was an important marketing tactic for generating quality leads, next only to in-person events, trade magazines and public relations. For online branding too, the tally for online marketing stood at a strong 40%. 

Cost effective advertising

Online advertising and marketing spending is expected to undergo a compounded annual growth of 27% over the next four years, reaching $61 billion by 2012. An idea of why this is happening comes from a study by the Target Corporation which found that in terms of ROI, internet advertising performed two-and-a-half times better than magazines and 15 times better than television.

So, does your Web site have a content management problem?


Although most organizations understand the fundamentals of content production, there are a number of problems that occur due primarily to bad content management. To discover if you have a content management problem, just answer the following questions about your company’s Web site:

Do customers have trouble finding what they need?
Is a lot of the information they find outdated or wrong?
Is content overwritten or erased accidentally and are previous versions unavailable?
Is navigation changing from page to page?
Does the homepage feel out of place on the site?
Is there difficulty ensuring that content is authored and audited by the right people?
Are the right people not able to put up content because of access control issues?
Is content not being updated quickly enough?
Are there difficulties in publishing, changing the format of or removing content from the site?
Does all the content exist in separate silos?
Are there difficulties in tailoring content towards specific customers?

If you answered “yes” to all or most or even some of these questions, then there is definitely a need for a quality content management solution.

What your CMS can do

What a CMS solution primarily does for your organization is to introduce a certain amount of automation and workflow structure into the content creation and publishing process, thus removing all the errors that come from ad-hoc publishing routines that occur in a plain-HTML process:

Distribute content creation

The primary advantage of a CMS system is that it puts content creation in the hands of the subject matter experts, who are usually non-technical business users. This means that it is much easier to put the content creation responsibility in the hands of a wider pool of employees, without requiring a technical team to constantly be on hand to make changes or updates. This also ensures that all content is timely and up-to-date.

Ensure content and brand consistency

Putting content creation in the hands of a larger pool of contributors also requires greater vigilance about content and brand consistency. Quality CMS solutions ensure that all common parts of any message such as the information about products, services, company profile, logos, and so on are single-sourced; thus ensuring that every message going out is properly representative of the organization.

Improve usability

An important contribution of a quality CMS solution is the improvements on information architecture it can provide. This contributes directly to the quality of user experience on a Web site as well as decreasing the time required for information retrieval.

Prevent liability

The back end of content management not only involves ensuring that content is authored by the right people but also that it passes through the right approval channels and is auditable. In Web environments working on HTML, the lack of expertise makes the review and approval process more haphazard and cumbersome. A CMS, on the other hand, brings some of the rigor that is commonly associated with print publication, ensuring that every piece of content passes through all the correct approval channels. Also since Web content is so ephemeral, every version of any published content must be captured in order to minimize liability of the organization. Content management systems provide just such a trail.

Ensure compliance

One of the most difficult aspects of the current information explosion is the tightrope walk between keeping up with competition while ensuring regulatory or other compliance. Here a CMS helps by ensuring that all updates and deletions of content are consistent across the Web site, thus preventing liability from stray pieces of content.

The business benefits


There are a number of significant business advantages from the quality and workflow improvements delivered by an efficient CMS system:

A CMS helps marketers respond effectively to new marketing challenges by allowing them access to Web resources without being at the mercy of over-stressed technical staff.
A CMS ensures more efficient scaling of the technical team by putting publishing in non-technical hands and freeing up IT for important technical tasks like building applications.
It ensures quality, accuracy, value and timeliness of content by ensuring that subject matter experts are free to publish content without the unnecessary mediation of technical personnel. And this is above the cost advantages gained by not needing technical assistance for every small modification.
It improves usability and information retrieval times and therefore contributes to user satisfaction, especially in an age of more ruthless and less patient online user behavior.
The organization’s branding is also more effectively controlled without requiring significant costs to maintain the structure and consistency of design and branding.
A content management system fosters greater knowledge innovation by freeing up content from traditional, static silos and allowing greater interaction between an organization and its customers.
Conclusion


Having an online presence is not enough if that presence does not in anyway contribute to increasing a company’s revenue. The key to ensuring an effective online presence is strong content, which in today’s age of ever-changing fluidity of information is an extremely difficult task. Organizations would therefore do well to invest in a quality content management system that will bring more rigor and flexibility to the process of content authoring.

So you have the idea that you want to start a website or blog in order to make money from Google adsense advertisements or affiliate product links.  But where are you going to get the content for your site from? Providing your site with high quality articles on a regular basis can be really difficult to do especially if you don’t have a plan.

The other problem is that you need to make sure that the content that you are posting on your website is fresh and unique.  You will also only get repeat visitors to your website if the articles that you are posting provide value to the reader.

There are several ways to obtain content for a website or blog.  First you may have already thought about writing articles for yourself.  But this will quickly become a huge task for you to do on your own since you will need hundreds or even thousands to get a significant amount of traffic to your site.

Instead of wasting all of your time writing articles that you could be devoting to growing your online business, you can easily outsourcing the article writing!  Article Underground Content and Traffic System is a service that can provide you with high quality unique articles.



Article Underground Content provides you with up to 400 unique articles just for your own use each month.  Article Underground Content has 36 professional writers that continuously research and write high quality articles on thousands of different keywords.

With this service you no longer have to worry about getting your site delisted by Google due to duplicate content problems because the articles are all unique and never used before.  If you have tried to use articles from article directories or PLR packages as content for your websites, you already know that these methods will not work because thousands of other internet marketers are already using them on their own websites.

Article Underground Content places strict limits on the number of times an article can be downloaded from their website so that you won’t find the articles that you plan to use plastered all over the web.

Another special feature of Article Underground Content is that the articles are already keyword optimized for a particular keyword.  When you log into Article Underground Content to download an article for use on your website, you will see that the filename of the article will contain the keyword that the article has been optimized for.

Article Underground Content articles generally have a keyword density between 1% and 3% which is exactly what the search engines are looking for.  You will no longer have to waste time with keyword density software before you can figure out which articles will work well with your exisiting site.

This is the best service for obtaining content available.  There is no other service that makes it this easy to create a website filled with quality keyword optimized content.  With Article Underground Content you can easily create a niche website empire monetized with Google adsense and affiliate links.

Another great way to use these articles is to post the articles to article directories, ezines or use them as a part of your e-mail marketing campaigns.  The possibilities are endless!

I recommend that you try the Article Underground Content service and see for yourself why I prefer this service over using individual article writers, PLR packages, or even articles from article directories.  You will find that you will not only save a lot of money but you will never have to worry about obtaining content for your site again!

Online social networks have rapidly increased in popularity, especially over the past couple of years. Social networking websites are popular because they easily allow you to find, connect with, and develop friendships with other internet users, often ones that share the same interests as you. To find those individuals, you must join a social networking website and create a profile. It is often advertised that your social networking profile is the key to making and finding friends online.

As previously mentioned, your social networking profile is important when it comes to meeting other internet users. This is because, in most cases, internet users are looking to chat with someone who has the same goals, views, beliefs, and interests as they do. Without a personal profile, it would be difficult or impossible to tell what your interests are. That is why social networking profiles are not only important, but they are needed.

When it comes to social networking profiles, a lot of focus has been placed on what you should include in your profile or display on your profile page. It has been said that pictures produce the best responses, as well as detailed personal information. Although a picture and detailed personal information may help to increase your page views, you may be getting views that you do not necessarily want. Despite what you may believe, most social networking websites do not have restrictions on who can view your personal profile. In fact, internet users, even those that do not belong to your online community, can easily see profile.

Since anyone, literally anyone, can see your social networking profile, on most social networking websites, you are advised to be cautious. Essentially, this means that instead of focusing on what you should put in your online profile, you should be focusing on what not to put. This is one the best ways to protect your safety, both on and offline.

As previously mentioned, pictures are often recommended with social networking websites. If you are interested in positing a personal picture of yourself in your online profile you can do so, but you are advised to carefully choose that picture. While you will want to look your best, you are advised against posting a picture that is too revealing or seductive in nature. Most internet users can look at these types of pictures without feeling a thing, but for others these types of pictures spell danger.

If you make the decision to post a picture of yourself in your social networking website profile, you need to be careful about the rest of the information that you post. Although you may not necessarily think about it, a picture is just a picture, but combined with your name and address, it could be a deadly combination. You are advised to only post your first name in your profile. This will make it more difficult for anyone to try and contact you off of the internet.

It is also advised that you carefully choose your location. A large number of online social networking sites require that you select a city, as well as a state. If it is allowed, you may only wish to list your state and not the city. If you are required to list the city and the state that you live in, you may want to think about using a nearby city or town, especially if you live in a small town. If an internet predator wanted to contact you and you lived in a small town, it could be fairly easy for them to find you. That is why it is advised that you carefully select the answer to the location question.

In addition to the above precautionary measures, it is advised that you do not post detailed information on your children, the location of your home, your income, or when you will be leaving for vacation. By keeping these and the above mentioned points in mind, you should be able to enjoy online social networking without having to always look behind your back.