Ennui Blog

Welcome back!

Last spring, I was in the planning stages of starting a website that would become a database of all the immigration policies of every country in the world. It was a daunting task (it still is!). I knew that I wouldn’t be able to set up the site overnight but I wanted to get the framework of the site going to that it would start building traffic for carefully targeted key phrases. I needed to create a ’stub page’ or a placeholder for each country, targeted for key phrases. These pages would build traffic and rankings until I would be able to actually write the content.

How could I do that when I had no content and no time to write it?

Welcome to the world of unique content generation.

Basically you use mad-libs (remember those?) to create this ’stub’ content quickly.

There are many programs out there that purport to do this, but they charge and arm and a leg. Anyone can do this themselves for free, as long as you have a little knowhow in MS Office and some data.

So, how do you generate web content from a template using MS Word Mail Merge, mad-lib style?

First, you need to think about what the pages will be about. For example, I wanted to create a stub page for every country that would basically target key phrases such as: immigration to comoros, immigrating to comoros, comoros citizenship, etc. There are two elements to creating these pages, a database and a template.

The database was simple. I needed a list of every country of the world. Then I used Mail Merge in MS Word to insert that country into the template, 300 times.

So, the first step was to get a list of every country in the world (thanks Wikipedia) and create an Excel database.

The next step was to write a country page template. I wrote six paragraphs of generic content using a template tag in place of each country like {country}. Then I put the template into MS word and opened the mail merge function. Once you load the Excel data, you need to replace your template tag with MS Word’s template tag. Once you’ve done all that, all you need to do is run the mail merge and have it open the results in a new document.

I ended up with 300 automatically generated pages. All I had to do at that point was cut and paste each new page into my Drupal CMS. There are solutions for importing multiple pages into most CMS’s with .csv files, but I was never able to get it to work correctly.

You can also write your templates with HTML, so you can add text bolding and hyperlinks. MS Word doesn’t care. It just looks for it’s tag to replace. Then you can insert this code into your CMS and it will show up as a page.

So, what was the result? I did all of this 8 months ago and the site has been very successful. I rank highly for many of the key phrases I targeted and have several hundred pages generating a ton of adsense revenue. About 40% of my Google Adsense revenue comes from Global Citizen Wiki.

Unfortunately, I was unable to roll out full country pages as quickly as I’d hoped. Doesn’t matter though, the site still has increasing traffic and rankings, despite the pages having no actual content on them.

Duplicate Content Concerns

I don’t really have to worry about duplicate content because each page is different. And the trick is to use your template tags in order break up any repetitive writing. This will ensure that each page appears to be unique content, which, in the end, it is.