Tag Archives: Effective Content

How do you define “Effective Content” for your business?

Effective Content

It is all well and good to repeatedly say that you should publish content on your website and you should take content marketing really seriously. I even wrote a lengthy blog post on “20 Reasons Why Your Business Website Needs Fresh Content“. But how do you decide what sort of content you should publish? After all, it’s not merely the targeted traffic that you seek, you seek targeted traffic that converts, that changes your visitors into your paying customers and clients.

The high-quality content that converts is “effective content” for your business and every business has its own definition of effective content.

Although every business may have its own unique definition of what sort of content works for it, there are some universal traits. Effective content has universal definitions that can be applied to any business. Listed below are the most important traits that can accurately help you define what’s “effective content” for your business.

It fills a need or solves a purpose

Why does your content exist? This existential question not just applies to our spiritual lives, it also applies to the content that we publish on our websites (and blogs). Why do you publish content? What is your ultimate motive? The above-linked blog post that gives you 20 reasons why you should publish content on your business website may help you to a great extent, but eventually you have to define the purpose. What purpose does your content solve? Do you simply want to help people who come to your website looking for some advice? Would you like them to buy your product or service someday or immediately? Do you want to establish a rapport with them? Is there a great need for the content that you are publishing?

It communicates on an ongoing basis

Effective content establishes a communication channel. You are communicating your messages, your ideas, your experiences to people who visit your website, and the people who visit your website, your readers, communicate their feedback and there needs to you. They may also communicate to each other if you have established such a platform (such as a comments section in a blog).

Effective content makes you use your unique voice with a human touch

Businesses are normally faceless. Customers and clients don’t get to see the human side of people who provide them products and services. Even at slightest pretext, they give rise to doubts and suspicions. On the other hand your content allows you to give a human voice to your business and talk to your current and prospective customers and clients in a friendly, familiar manner. This is the reason when you’re trying to create effective content for your website or blog, use the language used by your customers. Avoid using jargon unless it is unavoidable. Talk in the first person as much as possible.

Here is what you should do in order to talk with an individual voice: imagine that you’re talking to a single person sitting across you. Don’t worry about your content being read by one person, by 10 people, or even by 10,000 people. Just focus on that one particular individual and write as if you’re talking to him or her. This will give you a conversational style and you will appear friendlier and more approachable.

Effective content expresses a clearly defined, focused view

There should be no ambiguity when you are publishing content on your website. Don’t beat around the bush. Be clear about what you intend to say. Take for instance this blog post – you may think that I’m writing something about content writing, but I’m precisely talking about creating effective content particularly for your website. I have a clear idea of what I’m writing, and I have a clear idea of what you should get after reading this blog post. This sort of clarity must be there in every webpage and every blog post you publish.

Your effective content should be devoid of “sales speak”

When you try to sell, you impose your views on people, and nobody likes that. For instance, if you want to hire me as your content writer, it should be your decision. Although on my main pages you may find me trying to highlight my strengths and hence, trying to convince you into giving your content writing work to me, you will also find 100s of articles and blog posts that plainly talk about how to create direct content for your website. You can create a super effective content marketing strategy just by going through the articles and blog posts published on this website and you may never need to hire me for your business. I’m fine with that.

The quality of your content must be unmatched

This may not be always possible, but whenever you are publishing content on your website, give it your best shot. When I’m writing content for my own blog or website, I write it with same seriousness and dedication as I write for someone who pays me (after all sooner or later, the content that I publish helps me get more business, so in a sense, I’m being paid for this). So quantity is good, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of quality. Publish just one blog post every week, but it should be par excellence.

As a mentioned above, effective content may have different meanings for different businesses, it has a universal characteristic and the points contained within that characteristic are the ones I have listed above. What do you think about the best content for your business? Have some interesting points that you would like me to cover? Do let me know in the comments section.

Using Google analytics to know how effective is your content

Often when you want to know how effective your content is you gauge its popularity by the number of people retweeting the link or the number of people coming to your blog and leaving comments.

Although it feels good to know how popular your particular page or blog post is growing, the real effectiveness of your content can only be gauged by what people do after coming to that page. If people are visiting your link in hordes and then leaving for other external links immediately after reading that page you aren’t achieving much (actually you are in terms of brand building and recognition but that’s different subject).

Google analytics can give you an in-depth analysis of user behaviour when they access your content. It is a free tool and you can easily put the tracking code in one of your common files so that all your pages and blog posts are tracked.

So assuming that you are tracking your websites with Google analytics, after logging in select the website or the blog profile you would like to see an on the left-hand sidebar you get the “Content” tab. When you click it there is a further drop down menu and you will see links like “Pages”, “Landing Pages” and so on. In these two sections you will see:

  • The number of unique visitors to individual pages
  • The time they spend on these pages and blog posts
  • The bounce rate
  • The exit rate

Content effectiveness with Google analytics

If the number of unique visitors is increasing to a particular page it means the page is getting more exposure on search engine and other websites.

It matters how much time people spend on that page. The more compelling and relevant content you have on that page or blog post, the more time people are going to spend on it.

The bounce rate is when people come to your landing page and then immediately leave your website without exploring other parts of your website. If they don’t find your content valuable then obviously they are going to assume that it represents the overall quality of content on your website and then they leave your website straightaway.

So even if traffic to a particular page is increasing but then it also has a higher bounce rate it is not doing you much good. You have to analyse its content quality and see why people are leaving your website without exploring other pages or blog posts.

This is where you can gauge the effectiveness of your content. If more people are coming to that particular page or blog post and the bounce rate is lower it means the content on that page is effective.

Then there is the exit rate. How many people who come to your website leave your website completely from a particular web page or blog post. Although this is a subjective matter you should carefully examine the content of a particular page or the blog post if more people are exiting your website from that link.

You cannot gauge the overall effectiveness of your content by its search engine and social media popularity. Effective content engages your visitors and gives them a reason to stay on your website for a longer time. The longer they stay the better are your chances of converting them into your paying customers and clients.