Have a website that’s getting cold? It’s not time to throw it away, but you’d like to heat it up with a lot better internet promotion. A lot more people coming to it.

What to do? Pacing in front of their microwave, people today don’t even have 60 seconds for their food to heat. Make good content for your website? Horrors no! Wouldn’t it take months to get results? Yes, it might. In fact, could this be why only a few are patient enough to get results? Could be.

Since the credit crunch just destroyed 45% of the world’s wealth in the last 18 months, getting the results you want from a website reminds me of Jack London’s short story To Build a Fire.

Protecting yourself from the extreme financial cold with a website demands that you avoid some crucial mistakes. Building website traffic is much like building a fire. It takes work. It gradually gets hot. And the colder the surroundings, the more work it takes to get started. Yet, how much better to get started on it now before you’re (more) desperate later.

If you have lots of cash, you can throw gasoline on the fire. Buy clicks from the search engines. Hire content development experts, publicists and copywriters.

If you don’t have the cash, survival skills can help you to eventually build the same very comfortable shelter.

The most important survival skill for you is: Learn to make good content.

Why is good content so important? What’s good content?

Google is destination #1 for people on the internet. (Alexa.com says Google gets about 4% of the total page views for the entire internet as of March 2009. No one else comes close.)

What proves Google is still making websites famous for having good content? What proves good content is still the most powerful way to get people to your site? About a million people each month flock to one blog, SEOBook.com, seeking to learn how they can use content to curry Google’s favor.

Good content is not just a bunch of words, audio or video either. There are web pages with tons of content. All perfectly following Google’s rules. Yet the content was made only to follow Google’s rules. It has no appeal, no attraction for people. No one wants to look at it. Google is smart enough to see this, and looks for links and traffic too. If your website is tasty - people love it - they’ll link to it and tell others about it. Links and traffic.

Be careful when you spend your precious money hiring a content business or marketing company - people to write articles or produce content for you. Many have been indoctrinated to produce content that just follows the rules. Content that has no appeal for people. The internet is crawling with pages like this. Pages no one wants to read. YouTube is crammed with videos hardly anyone wants to watch. How many “here’s how to make money” websites have you seen with no appeal or usefulness whatsoever?

Good copywriters, publicists, directors and videographers work for hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour. You don’t have that kind of cash? Then you have to get picky. Learn what works, do it yourself, and get help from people you can trust.

What works? Simply this: Make content for people first, Google second.

What do people really want to see that’s not illegal, immoral or fattening? Learn from other successful websites in your subject area. Check these sites out with Alexa, Compete.com or Google Trends. Find out how popular they really are. What are they talking about most recently?

Don’t steal content. Make your own significant contribution to it. Copy from one source? That’s plagiarism. Use many sources? That’s research.

Reheat your website. Make it a tasty treat. Not as easy as nuking a TV dinner, but there’s something to make it a whole lot easier: content management. Not just any content management system will do, that’s for certain. Stay tuned.

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