In my last post (From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 – How To Make Money) I talked about the importance of the formula $ = V x CTR x CPC which means that the money that you make ($) is equal to the number of visitors (V) that you get to your site multiplied by the click through rate (CTR) of those visitors onto the ads on your site multiplied by the cost per click (CPC) of the ads being clicked on. I promised you last time that I would give you a powerful way to increase your V alongside search engine optimization and Twitter so here it is:

Have other people write the content for you.

Having great content is the key to generating traffic through search engines, referring websites, and social media. The expression “Content is King” is true and the more excellent content you have, the higher your V score will be and the more money you can make.

As an entrepreneur you are limited in your time and you need a lot of content and traffic to make a living off of advertising. How many articles could you possibly write per day? What if you could leverage the writing talents of people who loved to write and were great at it and have them create content for your website?

John D. Rockefeller, one of the most successful entrepreneurs who ever lived, once said: “I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.” In other words, if you want to build a successful business you need to build a plan to take yourself out of the equation and leverage the work of other people effectively.

Here is how my sitemap size has grown over the years since I started keeping track in September of 2005:

September 2005:            885 pages of content
September 2006:         4,067 pages of content
September 2007:       29,043 pages of content
September 2008:       42,397 pages of content
June 2009:                 65,687 pages of content

As you can see there has been significant growth over the years and my advertising revenue has climbed accordingly. How am I able to generate over 65,000 pages of content? It’s not coming from me writing thousands and thousands of articles. The answer is that I created a system that motivated other people to want to write and contribute to my website.

“I learned a valuable lesson to outsource to technology wherever possible and humanize the exception by hiring staff or handling it myself.”

Here is the quick story: I started creating articles for my site on famous entrepreneurs and quickly discovered that I while I enjoyed writing, it wasn’t what I wanted to do all day so I hired someone part time to continue doing the stories. As my site grew and my articles got picked up in the search engines, business coaches, marketing consultants, PR experts and other small business leaders wrote to me asking if they could add articles to my site. I picked the good articles and added them in manually.

It started as a trickle and soon dozens of people were writing in with articles. It got to be too much for me to handle. I was basically just adding author articles in by creating HTML files all day long. I tried outsourcing this to a student intern but she made too many mistakes. I learned a valuable lesson to outsource to technology wherever possible and humanize the exception by hiring staff or handling it myself.

To make a long story short, we created a system where authors could log in, write their bios, and add in their articles. Each article gets reviewed by our editor and then gets posted live on the site. We currently have over 4,000 contributing expert authors on the site. Without their help I would not have been able to generate so many pages in my sitemap and would not generate much advertising revenue either.

“If you’re hoping to build a business from advertising you need to create a road map for how you’re going to generate 10,000+ pages of content.”

So how do you get people to contribute their articles to your website? The key is to offer value in return. Expert authors who join my site rank higher in the search engines for their keywords, get increased traffic to their websites, build credibility as an expert in their industries, attract targeted customers, and get the chance to publicize their small business for free. It’s a win-win-win situation. My authors benefit from the great exposure, my readers benefit from the valuable information, and I benefit by bringing them both together, selling advertising, and not having to write the content myself.

If you’re hoping to build a business from advertising you need to create a road map for how you’re going to generate 10,000+ pages of content. It’s not going to be from you writing all those articles yourself so figure out a way you can add value and make it worthwhile for authors to contribute to your website.

In Part 3 of this series I will continue to attack the $ = V x CTR x CPC formula and will share one of the biggest breakthroughs that I made on the CTR side that drastically changed my mindset and made me realize that I had an actual business on my hands and not just a website.

As always I look forward to your comments. What experience have you had with getting other people to write for your website?