As the Internet grows ever larger, a few things keep your customers returning to you day after day. One, of course, is the excellent product or service you provide. But with many products, you're only one of perhaps dozens of vendors online offering identical items at identical prices. Once your customer figures this out, you may lose him.
The key to keeping them at your site, though, is to offer a little more. And the best extra you can offer is continually fresh content. People browsing are hungry for information, and they'll stay with you as long as you can provide it.
It's hard work to keep fresh content up all the time. But there are several emerging technologies that can help automate this task by allowing you to assembly-line your web production: writing or preparing all your information perhaps one day a week, then releasing it gradually to the Internet for you.
It's web automation, and it's going to be very important to your business in the future.
Blogs: The Easiest Way To Keep Content Fresh
More and more businesses online are discovering the miracle of blogs, daily or at least regular web journals that share all manner of information with their readers. From your personal life to pictures to crucial business information, blogs are a great and simple way to provide your website with content.
If you have ever used a blog, you know that most of them have a time-release function. You can tell your blog when to release a new post. You don't have to be at home or even in the country in order to update your website; you can have your blog do it for you.
And you don't have to just use blogs as blogs. Instead, you can set them up to use as continually-refreshing article-publishing engines.
Professional Web Publishing Automaters
If you use a large server to upload your web pages, you can use a professionally packaged web publishing automater to upload web pages in a timed-release manner. These packages tend to be expensive and may be more powerful than you need them to be, but they will do the job.
Where Do You Get The Content? Private-Label Rights Articles
Once you've determined how to automate your fresh content, you'll need to figure out where to get it. One answer to this problem is to purchase articles in bulk. Private-label rights articles are good quality articles optimized to keywords you need; when you purchase these articles, you purchase all rights to them. This means you can publish them in any form, as often as you wish, with your name listed as the author.
If you have a blog you keep updated, you can load these articles into your daily posts, or write part of each daily blog and insert article pieces or articles in their entirety. If you have an automater program, you can use these articles as refreshing content. Or, if you're interested in the power of XML, you can set these articles up in the database your website's XML draws from.
For Advanced Users: XML
Despite the hype of a few years ago, most small businesses have not yet discovered the power of XML. Based on HTML and related markup languages, XML allows you to create documents that behave like database entries, or databases that create documents for you. You note title, content, author, and other pertinent data, set up an XML template, and when you combine them you have a web page set up cleanly and efficiently.
If you maintain your articles in this manner, one of your fields can be a release date. Your XML engine, residing on your web server, would check your XML markup before creating a dynamic page. If the date is later than today's date, it would not create that page. In this manner, XML can provide you with a quick and convenient method for setting web pages up to release on specified days – again, with little or no interference from you.
Today you can find several XML programs that can perform these functions for you.
Overall
Your best bet overall is to use an XML package to create and publish your website. Why? Because the expense is low (like HTML, it's just a markup language), the web pages created are clean, and XML is an emerging technology with vast potential, not only for generating web pages, but for making your entire web-based operation clean and efficient.
The drawback is that many people don't understand XML yet. And if you're not ready for it, that's fine; most people aren't using it. But if you have all your articles in an XML system, you'll be ahead of the game. It will be easy for you to automate publishing, and when the search engines make the (probably inevitable) move to preferential treatment for XML tags, you'll be ready for them with your already-coded pages.
