6.7 An Over-the-Shoulder Tour of High-Quality Content Creation

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In this video I discuss:

  • An over-the-shoulder tour of high-quality content creation & what all of this looks like in practice

Here are the concrete tips/rules I can provide for adding images without going overboard:

  • Don’t insert images directly above or below headers, if at all possible. Most of these were inserted directly below a header, which looks pretty bad formatting-wise. Try to place them in-line between paragraphs or lines of text. You’ll notice in the published post that I moved all images that were below headers/bullet points to in-between paragraphs of text, or removed them entirely when the bullet point was too short to justify the use of an image (an elaboration on that in point #3 below).
  • Don’t feel the need to add images to every section, particularly if the section is only a couple of sentences.
  • Don’t force it. Sometimes an image breaks the “flow” up too much or just doesn’t feel right. In these instances, feel free to ditch using an image there, and just try to get one in at the next appropriate spot where one “fits” without being forced. For example, you’ll notice that I removed A LOT of images from bullet-by-bullet sections, because there just wasn’t anywhere to insert an image (besides right below the header/bullet point, which contradicts the top “rule” on this list). I’ve included screenshots of examples: two large bodies of text — one of which should be broken up with an image (with a red box to indicate where), and one of which shouldn’t be (due to how short the bullet points are, and as a result, there being now appropriate place for an image).
  • If you can’t find a good image for your intended spot relatively quickly, don’t use one. Just move on and try to fit one into the next-most-appropriate place.
  • Don’t use images that are portrait-oriented — they leave too much awkward white space.

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.7 Transcript Below

Okay!

At the risk of belaboring the point, I want to talk really quickly and give you an over-the-shoulder look of high-quality content creation. This is an article you’ve already seen a couple of glances of. And of course, you saw all of the SEO elements of it. I don’t want to dig in too in-depth here because I think it could get fairly redundant because you’ve just learned all of this. I just want to show you what it looks like in practice. So I don’t want to… you know… like I said, I don’t want to belabor the point too much. But I do want you to see this, demonstrated it in the real world.

And since we’ve already looked at all of the on-page SEO elements, I’m not going to call attention to those but calling back to earlier when we started off with a kind of a skeleton of an outline and followed it through the process. And I talked about, hey, let’s have small paragraphs, smaller chunks of text, because when you get too much text, it gets really, really, really overwhelming.

And to demonstrate this… if we look at how this looks like right now. Like this is actually a pretty big paragraph that I, in some cases, would consider breaking up. But since I have small paragraphs around it, I’m not going to do that. But this makes this content so much easier to read.

If I do this… which is how a lot of people start off writing content… and I preview it… Look at that paragraph, it’s just… it’s more intimidating. When your eyes see it instantly, your brain thinks: “Oh, that’s a lot of work to read!” Whereas when you see it here, it takes up more space but that white space in between is kind of a relief to the eyes. So if you compare these to one another, I think you’ll agree that this is definitely much, much better. Much less intimidating to read. Your brain is less overwhelmed by it just by looking at it.

And the same thing with images. You could see this is a lot of text. If you imagine this space without this image, look at how much text… that would have been a lot of text in a row. Especially coming… it would have gone from up here, all of the way through text text text text text. And it’s nice to just break up that and add a little bit of white space by using an image.

And just really quickly to show you how to add an image… let me undo all of those changes that I just made. The way you add images in WordPress really quickly is you just add your own line, you can hit Add Media, and then we have everything that I’ve uploaded to my library so far or you can upload from your computer. And then you would just select the image, you say… well, really quickly you select the image.

There are other options here, like I want it center aligned. You can set this in other places, too, but it’s easiest to set it when you’re inserting the picture. You can add a caption if you want. Like this one has the caption of “Look at that idiot”, and that’s how you see that below the image. And of course, this is where you set your alt text, your alternative text, which we’ve talked about how to use that in one of the previous videos in this section.

So if I wanted to add this image, I would just fill all of that out and then I would say insert into post and it’ll drop it right there for you. And then if you wanted to change the alignment from there you could. Some themes, when you click left-align, it wraps the text automatically. If that doesn’t happen automatically, please don’t send me a message saying, “Hey Ian, how do I wrap the text?” Because it comes down to having to change the hard code in your theme and it’s just not worth it at the end of the day.

It’s nice sometimes to have text-wrapped images. I honestly just always insert my images in blog posts centered, because again, I like the white space that it adds and it helps break up the post and the text a lot, okay?

And I got all of these images from the sources I told you – except obviously for this one in my before and after picture that I obviously had myself. It would be kind of weird if I found those on stock image websites.

But you can see going through here how I used headers. This isn’t just for SEO. They also really help make things easier to browse, they make things easier to skim, and read quickly and kind of find the information that they want. So if they don’t want to read any of this crap, they don’t want to read the introduction… I feel like I wrote them in a way that’s pretty engaging and relates to the reader.

But if they wanted to skip, they could just come down here and they can see… you know… “Okay, I just want to read about Pain Management Options Pre-Removal and During Removal”. And then I used h3 subheadings… Header3s… yeah, I think that’s another good way to say it even though it’s kind of awkward… within my h2 subheadings to, again, make it easier to skim.

And I mentioned previously… let me see, I have this in one of my Notepad files… let me see… I have that file that I mentioned a few videos ago that talks about rules for where to place images. I just need to remember where I’ve put it. I know where it is and I don’t really want to pull that up on camera because I don’t want to have to go through the process of blurring a bunch of my screen.

So I will hopefully remember to paste those rules about inserting images below this video in the description on the Free Internet Marketing Project website. And if you watch this video and it’s not there, just send me a message and say, “Hey, Ian! You forgot to add those rules you talked about for placing images.”

Because for me, it’s second nature these days. You don’t want to overdo it. And I had to write some really kind of firm rules that helped one of my writers tremendously. And so I want to share those with you since I have them and I think they’ll help you a lot if you’re new to this and you don’t really know how often you should be inserting images. For me, it’s just you don’t want to overdo it but you also want to break up the text.

So actually, when I created this post, I didn’t have this image in there. I went through, I inserted all of the other images and I didn’t have this one and when… Let me just show you what it looked like to give you an idea. Because I think you’ll get it, you’ll be like, “Okay yeah, that makes sense.”

So when I didn’t have that image in there, I went through here and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that is a lot of text back to back to back… I really need to break all of this up with one more image.” And so I added that image and that’s why you see that there now. And I think, hopefully, when you look at that, you can get a feel for, “Oh, that actually does help. That white space, it kind of gives some relief from all of the texts.”

So that’s pretty much it. You know… I’ve written this in small chunks that are easier to digest. I’ve used headers to make it skimmable.

You may even have instances where you could use bulleted lists or numbered lists. If it makes sense, use those because they’re very helpful for user experience. They make it much easier to digest information. Those are also really easy. You would just come in here and say, you would click bulleted list or you would click numbered list and you would go… Point #1, Point #2, Point #3… and WordPress makes these things really, really easy, okay? So you can see there’s my numbered list.

So I’m going to undo that and… there we go. Alright. Undid the removal of that image. And yeah, so now we’re back to normal here. But hopefully, that gives you a good idea of what a high-quality piece of web content looks like.

We can see here that this is 2,052 words which is a pretty good number count. And hopefully, if you go through and you read this article on Rue Tattoo yourself, you will see, “Okay, this is what high-quality content looks like”.

And I just want to emphasize… and by the way, you can write higher quality content than this. I can write higher quality content than this too, but this is more than sufficient. This is good enough. Remember: done is better than perfect. You don’t want to obsess, obsess, obsess and spend two or three times longer than necessary for an extra 10% improvement.

So if you find this intimidating… again, as long as you can write in a way that’s mostly grammatically sound and you can spell correctly, you can write high-quality content. Just focus on adding value and use the systems that you’ve learned in this section that talk about… you know, doing your research and creating your outline first. And then going through in each one of those points you put in your outline, write a paragraph or two and write the heading… you know…

And remember to just type what comes to mind and then do all of that at once and then come back and edit it later. And you will get better at this in time. Frankly, unless you have a really good idea for a podcast or a video, you are not going to succeed in this industry without writing content that’s very high quality regularly.

Anybody that tells you otherwise is probably just lying to sell you a product. There are some exceptions – I will admit that – but I will… yeah, I’ll concede that much. But generally speaking, no.

You are going to need to write high-quality content so you might as well just start practicing it now, okay? As intimidating as it is, if you practice, practice, practice, it’ll get easier, it’ll take less time, and you will get out more and more content in time. But these strategies that you’ve learned in this section will give you a much better head start than I had and a much better head start than I think most people have in this industry, alright?

So that’s it. That’s all I got. Alright.

You know you can do other things like you can set your featured image depending on your theme. This could be a really good idea. I’m not going to do it for this particular post. But, you know, if you do set a featured image, sometimes themes have some really handy, built-in features for that. So if I set this one as the featured image… we’ll see if my theme has anything for that really quickly. So if I go back to my Dashboard, go back to my homepage… okay so yeah, that does look pretty good actually. I’ll leave that. So setting your featured image can pull out kind of elements like this. So I actually really like that. So that looks really good. Okay, so I lied. I am going to do that this time.

And typically, when I am writing myself, I do set featured images. I do recommend it for you as well. It just gets kind of complicated and you’re going to have to figure out what the correct dimensions are for your featured image. And a lot of the times, you can find that… like I think my theme was 2016. So “2016 theme featured image dimensions”… and you have to do things like Google this. And with your theme name… And this is where it comes back to: you have to be willing to research these things yourself.

So, I think it’s 2016… maybe I used 2015… But still, this page contains the information. I think it said… yeah, up to 1200 pixels wide and it would automatically crop it for you. And if it doesn’t crop it the way you want, you need to go through and you need to figure out how to crop images yourself. There’s a really good… free tool for that that is Pixlr. And you don’t even have to download software, you can edit in browser. With Pixlr, you don’t need Photoshop or any of these other fancy things. So you can use this to like crop images.

But again, these are skills, you have to acquire on your own. Just kind of things you have to research and kind of play around with and get better at. It’s just the name of the game with internet marketing, okay? Or you can just ignore it for the time being. Because remember, right now what matters most is high-quality content, okay?

So if messing around the featured image frustrates you, you can’t get the dimensions right, you don’t know how to crop an image, just ignore it for now. You can come back to it later. It’s easiest if you set it up as you go, but if it’s really overwhelming; you just ditch it. Remember, what matters now is keyword research, on-page SEO, high-quality content – that is enough to get your business off the ground as long as you stick with it, okay?

So pick good keywords; write really high-quality, high-value content; and integrate those keywords into the proper pages or proper places in your content for on-page SEO and you will succeed in time. Period. Okay. That is the simplest path in internet marketing. It’s very effective even though it takes time. It can kind of make you want to pull your hair out. It works.

Alright. So anyways. Hopefully, that gives you a good idea of high-quality content creation. And hopefully, if you visit Rue Tattoo and you read it over, you agree that this is a decent chunk of quality content, and you have to think about it from the audience member’s perspective, right?

You may not care for this article at all because you may not need to get a tattoo removed, but I guarantee as someone that’s been in this audience before and is still in this audience. This is a very helpful piece of content for anyone considering tattoo removal because this goes so much more in-depth about how much it hurts and how to help reduce the pain than any article I’ve seen online for the topic.

So anyways, that’s that. I’ve gone on longer than I wanted to but I did want to give you a quick tour and kind of recap all of these things, call your attention directly to them. And now we’ll do as far as I’m planning in the initial content, we’ll do one more quick lesson and talk about in-depth when you can expect to see rankings. And then we’ll start talking about other ways in the next section to promote your sites, alternatives to just constantly posting high-quality content to maybe get results a little bit quicker or at least work some variety into it so you don’t feel like you’re going crazy all the time, alright?

So we’ll get to that next video, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group and other than that, I will see you in the next video.


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