Saturday, July 2, 2011

contrich.com : Outsource your Website Content

It’s always a pleasure to write about the Indian Startup who is solving the problems of other startups/ businesses and helping them to grow. Good optimized content with very strong SEO is the heart and soul of any web based startup/business. Content outsourcing is a necessity for businesses who want to build a strong online presence with quality content but do not have a dedicated content team. Not only does content outsourcing save time and resources, it allows you to dedicate your time to more pressing things such as promoting your business and developing new product ideas.

Contrich.com (a web product by ByteClip Technologies ) helps you to outsource your web content to content writer/freelancer online. Contrich aims to redefine the process of developing and tracking your website content in a collaborative manner. Contrich bridges the gap between issue tracking systems and content management systems to improve content quality on web pages. It provides clean and innovative interface to capture content issues on a web page.

Company: BytClip Technologies.
Product: contrich.com
Founder(s): Vinay Kumar Singh (B.Tech.+M.Tech. IIT-Bombay), Jayant Upadhyay (B.Tech.+M.Tech. IIT-Delhi), Amit Chandel (B.Tech. IIT-Bombay, MS - University of Toronto) and Manish Pal (B.Tech.+M.Tech. IIT-Delhi)

Before jumping into the outsourcing business you should have some answers ready on your table :

  • How do I decide the best fit provider for this job? Will a work sample from the provider help me with this?
  • How can I clearly specify my content requirements?
  • How can I monitor the work progress?
  • How can I review the written content and provide feedback in a timely manner?
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) : How can I effectively specify my SEO requirements and check that the content written by the provider is meeting those requirements?
Since long, the answer to all of these questions has been communication with provider via email and word documents. These are the two most common and widespread used approaches, but it’s time we really thought about the fact that they do not provide the complete answer to any of the questions posed above. It’s time we decide whether these old ways are enough for us. These modes of communication are simple and effective for articles and blogs, but when it comes to writing content on web pages - they have some serious drawbacks. Lets list a few of them out here:
  • The provider sends you his sample writings but the content belongs to some other domain and you are not able to judge whether the provider has the required domain expertise.
  • You receive the sample work in an email or in a word document attached in the email, but you are not able to visualize your web page with this content written on it.
  • The Content send by the provider does not fit in the particular section of your web page. You may need more content or truncate some of the received content.
  • You may want to review the content while it is in the development phase(rather than after completion) so that you can bring up issues and provide early feedback.
  • The provider can write the content and test its SEO effectiveness using a multitude of tools available on the internet. However, true SEO effectiveness can only be calculated when the content has been integrated into the page as search engines also consider the html tags when calculating your website’s ranking. The delivered content might not meet your SEO expectations and your integration effort may be wasted.
All these and many more of such problems deteriorate productivity due to increased number of development/review/verification cycles, and may lead to poor content quality under pressed timelines. Contrich tries to solve these issues with its collaborative nature and a very simple workflow.

How Contrich works:
The following sections will demonstrate this fact with the homepage of a sample clothes website and some workflow screenshots.

HomePage of a Sample Clothes Website
Requirement Specification
You can start by creating a ticket for your web page and mark the sections where you need content. You can edit the marked sections and specify the nature of your content requirements in each of them(Refer the screenshot below). Here, the sections marked in brown are where you want content to be written.
Requirement Specifications
Getting the Sample Work
Create a test account for the provider and assign the ticket to him. You can mark the sections where you want him to write sample content(Refer to the screenshot below). The provider will then write his sample content in these sections.
Getting the Sample Work
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The provider(and even you) can check the SEO Report for a web page which shows the most significant words and phrases on the web page. This helps him in doing iterative development where he is able to achieve your SEO expectations during the content development phase itself.
SEO Report
Content Review
You can review the content written in any of the sections and report problems on it. The problem sections of a page are marked in red and thus easily identifiable by the provider. The provider can view all the reported problems on a given section and modify the content accordingly.
Problem Reporting

View Reported Problems
Finishing the job
No more searching through your email attachments and word documents – the provider just has to update the ticket and assign it back to you. You have the final html page with the complete content written on it!! Now you can easily extract the page from Contrich and integrate it into your back-end system.
Try contrich.com and do share your experiences with us.
Source Contrich Blog.

1 comments:

Jason Aldein July 20, 2011 at 6:35 AM  

Thanks for the information about outsourcing .

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