These days I’m writing for a client who wants to put up lots of educational content on his website and then wants to leave it on his visitors whether they want to buy his product or not. Of course we’ve mentioned on every prominent web page – again, without pushing the visitors to buy – that he intends to sell the product he’s talking about on his website and they can buy it as and when they feel like. He believes that educating his visitors is better form of selling compared to writing traditional sales copy. I agree with him.
But while writing educational content for him I’m taking care that the phrases and the keywords that I’m using get him the right sort of traffic. After all it’s a business website and not a reference website. Along with getting "how to do this" and "how to sort out that" kind of traffic he should also get "I want to buy this" kind of traffic and in fact such traffic holds more value for him. Striking a balance is difficult but that’s how an experienced content writer comes handy.
Benefits of educational content
I had lots of "educational" stuff on my website when I was designing and developing websites; in fact people had started suggesting that I should publish an e-book teaching how to become a web designer and start selling it. The downside of it was, most of my visitors wanted to learn web designing and very few wanted me to work for them. This shouldn’t happen when you are publishing lots of educational content on your website. They should definitely learn and get more informed, but they should also be interested in buying from you. Once you’ve figured out how to achieve that, here are a few benefits of publishing lots of educational content on your website/blog:
- Educational content gets you more search engine traffic. Search engines are more interested in finding the right information for their users and somehow the guys working at the major search engines think educational content should get priority over commercial content.
- It helps you establish your authority. When people know that you know your stuff, they develop a respect for you, especially when you share your knowledge again and again and they find that knowledge useful. I’m not regretting that I published lots of educational content on my website, it’s just that my targeting was misplaced. Share your knowledge and experience consistently – if I’m consistently sharing my thoughts on copywriting and content writing on my blog or website people will prefer to hire me rather than the person who merely has 12 drab pages from where he or she urges his or her visitors to hire him or her.
- It familiarizes your prospective customers with your product or service. Many people don’t do business with you because they don’t know enough about your product. When they read lots of material on your website or blog they get to know about the benefits of your offer and then they are in a better position to make up their minds. In fact after reading your educational content people who aren’t even thinking of buying your product or using your service may decide to do so.
- It helps you in establishing a social networking and social media presence. Most of the content promoted on Twitter, Facebook and Digg is educational or newsworthy. Sales copy rarely makes it there because why would people promote your links where you simply urge people to hire you or buy from you, what is there in it for them? Educational content on the other hand deserves to be promoted because it helps others and increases the goodwill of people promoting it.
- You open yourself for challenge and hence broaden your growth prospects. When you share your ideas, your knowledge, your wisdom openly and then invite people to share their thoughts, you expose yourself to criticism and counter arguments. This either earns you critics or admirers, and it’s definitely better than having none.
Can you come up with more benefits of publishing educational content on your website? Please do share them in the comments section.