Content Generation

(Last Updated: Wedesday, August 3, 2022)

If there is one sure‑fire way to guarantee that people find positive, flattering content about you (or your business) on the Internet, it is to write articles and upload images and videos yourself.

Just remember that no matter how much content about yourself that you upload to the web, all of the negative content will still be there. The objective of flooding the web with positive content is to push the negative content off Page One of Google search results in the hope that people searching your name will be so engrossed in the good stuff that simply will never get to the bad.

Generating content for the web is not terribly difficult.

Of course, the more professional your content is, the more effective your messaging will be. So if you are on a limited budget, or if you do not have a budget at all, and if you do not have a journalism degree, then it would be best to at least have a friend or family member read over your articles for spelling, grammar, and punctuation before you go live with them. This is not meant to be a knock on you. The newsroom of every major publication in the world has a litany of copy‑editors who do second‑ and third‑reads on all stories before publication.

Platforms like YouTube were built to be utilized by the public at‑large. The more content that gets uploaded to YouTube, the more money its parent company, Alphabet, Inc., will make. So the platform was designed to be used by non‑professional videographers. Of course, editing video may require specialized skills, training, and experience, depending on the complexity of what you hope to achieve. But for the most part, you will be able to effectively use YouTube the very first time you try.

Once you have crafted some articles and chosen some other suitable multimedia files, you will want to identify as many platforms as possible to post them. You can register your own domain name and upload your content there. Then, of course, there are the mainstream social media options like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. But there truly are scores of other social media choices that are not as popular as those four and they should not be ignored. There is TikTok, Pintrest, Reddit, Weebly, and so many more.

Those websites that update their pages with fresh content most often tend to do better with Google search than websites that are ignored by their owners. It also is imperative to effectively utilize title tags, meta description tags, and meta keyword tags on every page you upload to the World Wide Web. These tags will help ensure your pages are returned in Google search results whenever someone queries a word or phrase about which you have written.

(Similarly, there are "alternate text" and "title" tags that should be placed atop every photograph that you upload to the web, as these tags inform Google what your images are all about, thereby improving the chances those images are contained in any relevant search results).

All hope should not be abandoned for those who do not have the time to generate content on their own and who feel that retaining a full‑service reputation management firm like Goodman & Baxter is beyond their financial reach. In most U.S. cities, there is an entire litany of qualified and talented freelancer writers who may charge a nominal rate, either by the hour or by the word.

When uploading your own content about yourself or your business to the Web, you are in complete control over what people see and read, and you are free to make edits, additions, and other tweaks to that content at any time, whereas hard‑copy publications such as newspapers and magazines are impossible to change.