First encounter with content.

You should mix longtail targets with emotional appeal to produce engaging content.

It doesn't seem like a rant but I'm a little puzzled. Why did you choose this market? Do you know anything about preventing bike theft or did you choose this because you thought it might be profitable? It's far easier to market something you're familiar with.

As for getting quality content. Check out this fine writer. Rose Anderson

I had my bike stolen and it was brand new. Best advice is to get an old rusty one. Like at a garage sale and do not pay a lot of money. It is sad when your brand new bike is gone. Still, I wonder who would break into my tool shed to steal a cheap $99 bike, but there we go.

Anyone got any advice for me?

I am not even sure what you are asking. If you are strictly asking about how to create content you have 3 options.
1. Write it yourself
2. Have Someone else write it
3. Get content that is already created that you have the right to use.

Many folks will tell you that while it is okay to have a few items from number 3, you don't want to build your whole site around it. Number 1 is the cheapest option. If you are a half way decent writer and have been researching the topic, then you should be able to bang out articles fairly quickly, just don't try to be a perfectionist.

Number 2 comes in many flavors and costs. You can try to find some folks over at fiverr to do the articles for you. You can find warriors in the warriors for hire section on this forum or you can use a service like odesk, freelancer, etc. The other thing you could try to do is reach out to other people in the field and get them to write blogs/articles for you. Most will just want credit for the article and a link back to theirs.

The last part of all of this, is that you really haven't told anyone here what type of site you are creating. What is your model? Where is the revenue? Are you hoping people will click on banners? Are you trying to sell them an info product? Are you trying to build a list? If you think you are just going to build a site, throw some content and a few banners on it and be flooded with visitors, you are mistaken. You really need to determine what your strategy is before you just start throwing content up on your site. This is kind of like starting to paint a room and then deciding what color you want it to be.

Am I right in thinking that you're an affiliate and not a vendor, Nasher? You don't have your own "bike-security product" which you're doing this in order to sell, right?

If you are (an affiliate), the last thing you need or want on your site is "copy that sells". (Other than possibly a paragraph to "sell" your opt-in: that's the one thing you do need to "sell", so you can build your list).

Affiliate don't "sell": it's up to the vendor to do that.

Have you established whether there are products in this niche that you can promote as an affiliate? :confused:

You're going to generate your traffic from SEO? Personally, I'd suggest that you don't to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use to build my business) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living just from that traffic, and I wouldn't even be cursing too much if Google de-indexed all my sites this afternoon. Don't depend on search engines for traffic. That's what so many of the people here (and in other forums) have done, who end up wondering where they've gone so wrong.

Write for your audience first. Don't worry about SEO, that will come later.

The most important thing, though, is to build a list. I'm in the process of getting my first affiliate site up and ready but I've not done anything except research and write so far.

IMO, from what I've heard, read and been told, this is what I will be doing:

1. Writing a good number (say 25 or more) of articles on the topics associated with the niche.
2. Write a report with more indepth information in it and some really good tips.
3. Build the website in Wordpress (or anything else for that matter) with clean and clear navigation to each page.
4. Place an opt-in form on the pages at eye grabbing points, offering the free report you wrote in step 2.
5. Set up an auto responder email series that sends more free info to your new list.
6. After 2-4 emails, send them a really good offer you've found that may be of use. Link to your affiliate product.
7. Drive your audience towards these opt-in forms.
8. Search for relevant blogs and read them.
9. Contact them, saying you've got an interesting article that fits their audience and may be of use to them. Send them one of the articles off your site, with an author bio linking back to a relevant page.
10. Rinse and Repeat.

I may have missed somethings out, but that's the general gist.

Another thing that works is writing posts around topics that get lots of buzz at twitter.

Now that was funny.

Man check out The Challenge

It's a great introduction to Internet marketing and will give you some good tips along the way. As you have your site already just roll with the one you have but check it out quick as it is due to be taken down soon due to a new one on the way for August.

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