Executive summary: for a website to be truly successful, it can't just be a shopping cart, a page full of advertisements, or a lead capture form. You can keep such sites alive with massive advertising outlays. But to enjoy natural traffic, a website needs to be a destination that people actually want to go to willingly. And that requires some kind of content. Almost every successful website is built on content, as I'll show with some big-name examples.

If you think about it, there is not a single solitary major successful website that is not based on content. It's amazing how often businesses on the web forget about this. Partly that's because we've come to think of content so narrowly, usually as static text.

Certainly, most content is text, and text usually presents by far the best return on investment. In no small part because it