What Is SiteContent?
Wealthy Affiliate just released their newest upgrade to the Wealthy Affiliate which they are calling SiteContent and they are describing as the “Ultimate Writing Platform”. In a nutshell, it’s a way to write content for your websites without a whole lot of distraction.
What Does SiteContent Consist Of?
Sitecontent has a few different features. As it’s currently implemented, broadly speaking, it has:
- Editor
- Goals
- Templates
- Integration into your Websites
- Writing Stats
- Grammar Check
Editor
Right now SiteContent’s Editor is a no-frills afair. It’s what you would expect from an editor, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of clutter to it. It gives you the basic H1 – H3 heading tags, paragraph tags. As far as formatting content it lets you bold, italicize, and underline words. Finally, it gives you the ability to add hyperlinks, ordered and unordered lists, and a grammar check.
From the editor you can save it as a draft or publish it directly to one of your websites. You also have the option of making an article a template.
Goals
The goals part of SiteContent allows you to set writing goals. It gives you an option to set a number of words written goal, number of articles written goal, or both. It also allows you to make your goal timebound by specifing when you would like to complete your goal.
Templates
This isn’t really what it sounds like. At first I thought it would let you create a generic content template that you could customize later. Such as a review template that would have certain headings that you use along with the Htags already specified that way for the most part you can just worry about typing your content.
However, at first glance it seems to be more of a content “style formatting coach”. You specify how long of an article you are shooting for, how many paragraphs you are wanting, and the different number of headings you want to use. You then are taken to the editor where it tracks the number of paragraphs you type, the number of headings and the number of words.
Website Integration
Similar to how they did SiteComments, Wealthy Affiliate integrated SiteContent with the SiteRubix hosting platform. This allows you to write your website content in SiteContent and then click a button to have it published onto your website that is hosted on the SiteRubix platform.
Writing Stats
SiteContent displays writing stats in three main places. It displays them on the “Stats & Goals” page, On the main SiteContent Dashboard, and in the editor.
Stats & Goals – On the “Stats & Goals” Page you are shown the total number of words you have written, hown many articles you have published via the SiteContent system, how many of those articles are indexed in Google, and the progress you have made on your Word Count and published article goal.
Main SiteContent Dashboard – On the main dashboard it again shows you the number of words you have written total, number of articles published, number of articles unpublished, and an indicator telling you what percentage of WA members you have written more content than.
Text Editor – Finally, the actual editor tells you how many words you have typed in an article and if you are using a template it will also show you the number of paragraphs and headings as well.
Positives of SiteContent
From what I have seen of it so far, SiteContent seems to have a lot of potential. There isn’t a whole lot of distraction within SiteContent, so you can focus on writing your content without a lot of the pesky things that stick out like eye sores in the WordPress editor.
I think the Stats & Goals part of SiteContent will give a lot of people motivation to write. The graph and pie chart makes it easy to track your progress with your writing goals and provides incentive to write especially when you might not feel otherwise motivated to write.
I think the “You’ve written more words than XX% of WA Members!” is a nice touch of gamification going to get people’s competitive juices flowing and channeling those competitive juices in a positive direction of building out their niche websites. Unlike the Ambassador system which has the potential to distract people from building out their websites, I can see SiteContent’s gamification leading to a lot more people writing and adding content to their website(s) on a consistent basis.
Negatives of SiteContent
No Pictures(Yet) – SiteContent is still in its infancy(especially as I type this.) Currently, it’s text only and you can’t insert pictures. As such, you would have to publish your content live to your website and then go back and add in pictures. For some people, this is definitely a deal breaker right out of the gate.
Small Glitches – Another thing that I have noticed so far is that if you highlight words and then try to use the backspace key to delete those words, SiteContent won’t delete them. Another oddity I have found is that SiteContent also won’t allow you to highlight words and then bold those words. You have to select the bold option, type your text and then unselect it.
What’s the point? – I can definitely see people wondering why on earth you would leave the WordPress editor to type content only to click a publish button to publish that content back onto your WordPress site.
Templates – I’m terribly disappointed that templates are basically there to keep track of how many headings, paragraphs, and words you have used in an article. It would be much better if it was an actual article template that had dummy text in the headings and paragraph sections that way you could just delete the dummy text and start typing without having to mess around with specifying the H tags and such.
Final Thoughts
Even though they have some kinks to work out, I think I will start using it from now on to write all of my content. I like the idea of being able to track my lifetime total of words that I have written. I think the goals section is valuable in helping me keep motivated for writing content for my website. I think one of the areas where people struggle the most in the online world, me especially, is creating content for their website. I think SiteContent will do a great job of motivating people to do just that.