Content doesn’t just mean text full of numbers and hypothetical statements. It needs to solve a purpose, your visitors and prospects must find it useful. After all people don’t visit your website or blog out of some altruistic reason — they are always looking for something, whether it is information or entertainment. If they don’t find your content useful, if it doesn’t appeal to them, they are going to leave your website quickly without doing business with you, and they are never going to come back if they remember you or your website. Whenever somebody visit’s your website, he or she is thinking, "What’s in there for me?"
But how do you make your content useful; how do you make it cater to a particular need? It’s very simple — by putting your visitors’ interest first. This may seem like a cliché beaten to pulp by various "copywriting experts" but you know what, consider it a miracle, but it really works. Whenever you are creating content for your website, or whenever you are getting it written, keep in mind what you can offer in the best manner and how it can help your visitors. A few days ago I wrote about instilling confidence and trust with your copy. If your visitors can trust you and have confidence in what you have to say they are not apprehensive when they have to purchase a product or service from you. This trustworthiness can be established by encouraging your visitors to come to your website again and again, and this can only be achieved by providing something extremely useful and informative, and on a regular basis. Once trust is established they buy from you even if you don’t ask them to and simply mention that you offer a particular product or service.
Every product or service has a niche market and people are constantly looking for useful information. Let us assume that you sell an accounting software. Instead of mentioning on every second page of your website or blog how great an account package you’ve got, you can publish interesting trivia about your product. Recognize your market and generate content accordingly. If you are targeting small businesses with not much knowledge about accounting and bookkeeping you can publish lots of tips and tutorials on how to easily maintain books with your accounting software. You can also talk about various accounting procedures and how your software tackles them. You can publish objective reviews of other accounting software products so that people can compare and make educated decisions. You can also publish cheatsheets that make it easier to use your software. Sky is the limit when it comes to creating useful content around your product.
The same goes for a service that you provide. Take for example my online content writing service. You may think what is the use of publishing content that helps others become better content writers and online copywriters? When I am sharing my knowledge and experience I am establishing my authority. I agree…90% of my visitors must just be coming to learn content writing and copywriting, and I’m really glad, and humbled, that I can teach them something, but the remaining 10% can see how much I know about content writing. By going through various pages and blog posts they can make out that I can improve their conversion rate as well as search engine rankings by my writing experience. I may not be one of the best writers on the Internet but I definitely know what I’m doing and I abundantly share that on my website.
By constantly generating highly useful content I also increase my chances of getting linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers and consequently, increase traffic and search engine rankings.
Creating useful and valuable content may seem like an uphill task in the beginning but you will find in the end that it is genuinely rewarding. You increase your goodwill, you strengthen your brand, and you encourage people to pay close attention to what you’re saying and offering.