Category Archives: Web Content

The value of your content in the context of social media

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There was a time when in order to promote your content you had to focus on search engines and external links. Even today both these entities matter a lot but there is a third force that could prove to be far more penetrating when it comes to distributing your content: social media.

Some prominent examples of social media are blogging, Twitter.com, FaceBook.com, Ning.com, Youtube.com, Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Some of these are interactive tools and some are social bookmarking and recommendation websites but their basic function is helping people promote and generate content.

The compelling reason for having great content, and lots of it

These days it is an aberration if an organization or a professional individual providing services on the Internet does not publish a blog. A blog helps you communicate with your audience unhindered by geographical and technological barriers. Blogging has almost become a “traditional” content publishing platform as many people are quickly switching over to micro-blogging. Nevertheless, blogging still rules when it comes to publishing and promoting content; in fact most of the links being promoted on the social media and bookmarking websites belong to blogs.

So what is the value of your content in the context of social media and what all should you consider while creating and publishing content? It is very similar to creating a viral marketing campaign.

Your content on social media websites thrives upon the users’ tendency to recommend interesting and relevant links to their followers and friends. In fact some users produce no original content; they simply forward and promote other links with their own comments sprinkled here and there.

There are two interesting features of users active on social media websites:

  • They promote content
  • They discuss content

In order to leverage the power of social media, first of all you have to create content on a regular basis and the content must be interesting and valuable enough so that they feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers. On websites like Twitter.com people tweet your link and then their followers retweet it if they feel like it and that is how your content spreads. The same thing happens on FaceBook. On Digg.com the users “digg” your link if they like it and the more “diggs” your link can garner the more prominent spot it gets on the website. In the case of StumbleUpon the more thumbs-ups you can get, with greater frequency your link is put in front of its users.

In the case of bloggers if they like your content they link to it and write about it. From there, further, other bloggers and social media users can write about your content, link to it or promote it.

Does your content always have to be likeable and acceptable? Not always. Sometimes people will write about your content, link to it and promote it to show disagreement or express a totally different point of view. Just make sure that whenever you are publishing highly controversial and contradictory content you are sure of what you are doing. This is more important amidst social media websites where it takes a long time to build reputation and very little time to dismantle it.

The moot point is if you want to generate and publish content for the purpose of spreading your ideas and getting more business you have to work on it keeping social media in mind. The power of social media is so great that some Internet marketers have already started claiming that you no longer need the whimsical search engines to get quality traffic. In fact the traffic that you get from social media websites and blogs is more targeted because it is promoted by real people rather than ranking algorithms.

There was a time when the search engines like Google asked for more and more content so that that content could be indexed and ranked. There was a lot of talk, there still is, about creating content that is search engine friendly as well as human friendly. Sometimes if you didn’t face much competition you didn’t even have to generate lots of content. But this is not the case when you want to promote your website through social media websites. You constantly have to publish content that creates buzz among social media circles.

This trend spells trouble for organizations and individuals that have always been downplaying the value of quality content. On social media you cannot create a credible presence unless you have credible content.

Of course, by simply creating and publishing great content you cannot become a social media darling; you need to have a following. It is very hard to make people listen to you if they haven’t listened to you in the past, and that too, repetitively. People on Twitter and FaceBook sometimes have thousands of followers and they themselves are following thousands of people. This means a continuous stream of messages in front of them. How to develop a following that eagerly listens to you? This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post but yes it is an important part of leveraging social media. You cannot hack into that. Either you have to be a celebrity or a well-known person in your niche, or you have to build your followers from scratch and this may take many months. Collaborating with people who are already highly active on various social media websites may help.

More on content and branding

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A month ago I had written about how to control your branding by writing or generating customized content. As it is rightly mentioned in this blog post aptly titled how to improve your branding with your content, on the Internet, you are what you write.  Your words are your greatest representatives on the Internet because they communicate with your visitors in your absence.

You can strengthen your brand by carefully creating your content strategy. You have to create content that highlights your main strengths and leverages them to get you more clients and customers ultimately. I have seen many websites and blogs in a great hurry to generate content so that they can quickly get traffic from the search engines and sometimes such flukes really work but sooner or later they end-up causing damage to their brand because the right message conveyed through right content is more important than getting random traffic from search engines through haphazardly generate and published content.

Similarly, if there is no substance in your content you cannot instill confidence among your readers and prospective customers and clients. It’s like the real world: no matter in what environment you move, you have to establish respect and authority in order to make people listen to you, pay attention to you, and take the action you want them to take.

How do you instill that confidence? Share with them as much information as possible. Instead of selling a product or a service through your content, try to help them make an educated decision. I know in the end we all want to earn more business, but don’t turn this aspiration into a desperate and grotesque exercise. Write to inform, write to put your point across, and definitely write to convince, but don’t use verbal tricks to entice your customers and clients. Once they trust you, once they trust your brand, they will definitely want to do business with you.

Every word matters, and so does every sentence. This is especially important with the advent of social media because when you are interacting through social media you are leaving your inherent footprints all over the Internet. The more you interact, the more content you generate, the more people become aware of you.

Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?

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words-search-engine-ranking

By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.

Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.

There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.

Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.

This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.

Image source: brandis78

Branding with a customized content

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The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Over the Internet branding acquires a unique importance because often your presence, product and services are existing in a virtual world – people, your prospective customers, can view the images of your products or services, or even attain some digital samples if possible, but they cannot do more than that. They cannot touch or feel your offerings. If they want to purchase a pair of trousers from you, they cannot try it before buying it.

So to inspire confidence among your consumers branding becomes more important. Branding convinces them that yes, whatever they buy from you is going to be up to the mark, and buying from you doesn’t involve more risk than, say, buying from a brick-and-mortar store.

How do you establish such a brand presence on the Internet? Testimonials, recommendations and affirmations from existing customers and clients surely help. But what also helps is the way you communicate, the content on your website, your blog, and your social profile.

We operate in a conversation economy these days: what you say, and how you say it, can have immediate repercussions. Your latest blog post or article can reach the farthest corners of the planet within a few seconds with a couple of tweets or a few hundred diggs. Your content can go a long way to help you establish your brand on the Internet.

Useful, relevant and well-meaning content helps you generate a community around your presence. There are many entrepreneurs who did nothing but nurture a community around their blogs or websites. They spent more than a year generating awesome content and establishing their loyalty, and consequently, their brands. Eventually there came a time when their visitors themselves started saying that they would buy or subscribe to anything recommended or promoted by those blog or website publishers. So when these content publishers started selling on their blogs and websites, they had a ready-made market that was eagerly waiting to do business with them.

Customized content means generating content your audience can relate to. A person who publishes a blog on SEO and whose advise benefits his or her audience has a greater chance of succeeding when he or she decides to provide professional SEO services. Many among his or her current readers will eagerly become his or her clients because they are aware of the fact that he or she can really help improve their search engine rankings. Similarly, a person who writes authoritative material on management consulting has a greater chance of converting his or her visitors into his or her clients.

You can apply this branded content technique to any business.

Maximizing Your Web Presence in a Tough Economy

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As we all watch the economy go from terribly bad to even worse, many are left wondering how to make the most of their existing company resources. For many companies, the idea of investing in marketing services of any kind is offensive as so many face major cutbacks and even layoffs.

However, the show must go on and every company must examine the marketing materials they already have developed and how they can breathe new life into them without taxing scaled-down budgets. One of the best marketing vehicles to leverage in new ways is the company Web site. This highly-versatile medium allows huge flexibility and scalability, cost-effective updates, and worldwide reach.

The idea of a fluid, regularly-updated Web site is foreign to many businesses where Web copy remains static, with only the most vital information provided. The reason for the bland copy on most sites is a lack of internal resources to dedicate to writing new content.

Web content is time consuming to develop and requires a skill set and understanding of how the Web and Internet searches work. If the writer does not understand the complexities involved, the Web site’s content will be ineffective and it will not be found quickly through Internet searches.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to outsource Web writing, it can be a very cost-effective option for Web copy development and one with a significant return on investment. But, all Web copy writers are not created equal. If you choose to work with a freelance Web writer, be sure they possess the following skills.

  • SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves embedding industry-specific keywords into Web copy to help prioritize it in Web searches. If this is not done, the Web site will be buried several pages into a Web search.
  • Editing. While good writing skills may seem like a no-brainer as you choose a freelancer, it is also important that they be strong editors. You do not want to edit your own Web copy and a typo is inexcusable on the World Wide Web.
  • Selling. Web sites should spur sales (or at least inquiries about your company). Spinning a great company story that drives home its unique differentiators will garner more interest than “Contact Us.”
  • Blogging. Talking about your company and industry is a great way to build thought leadership. Good freelance writers know how to leverage news and industry trends to develop effective blog content.
  • Communication. Freelance writers work offsite and the client has less control over the time they spend on projects or how they are billed. Demand good communication and frequent updates from your freelance writers.