Tag Archives: Content Publishing

How much content does your customer need to read before doing business with you

This question was asked on Quora.com and I wrote a small answer over there, but then I decided to do a bigger post here on my blog. So how much content does your customer need to read before he or she decides to do business with you? First of all, do you really believe that your content can make a difference? I think for the sake of this blog post, and for that matter, even for the sake of future blog posts, I am going to assume that you take your website content really seriously and consider it to be an inveterate part of your marketing strategy.

With that out of the way, how much content is needed before the actual business happens? It depends on what niche you are dealing with and what product or service you are trying to sell/promote. Websites representing well-known brands might not need as much content as a lesser-known brand might require. For instance, Forbes.com might need less content to promote their business content section compared to, say, credible-content.com. Nonetheless, you will find tons of content on Forbes.com. Why?

The primary reasons why a well-known company like Forbes.com needs as much content as any other website are:

The Internet creates a level playing field for bigger and smaller players so it doesn’t really matter whether you are Forbes.com or credible-content.com when it comes to optimized content and better search engine rankings
People can access your content from all over the world and it isn’t necessary that in your part of the world Forbes.com is as well-known as in the USA or even in India

These are the reasons why Forbes.com requires massive amount of content just like any other website – it needs to convince its visitors into doing business with it and for that they have to visit the website again and again.

Doing business on the Internet is all about credibility and trust and these two traits can only be developed with lots of quality content.

It’s not just a brand that decides how much content is going to be read before people decide to do business with you. It also depends on the requirement. Here I will refer to the example I used at Quora.com

If you want to purchase an iPhone you are going to purchase it and for you the only difference is from where you are going to purchase. If price is not an issue you might straightaway purchase it from the vendor’s website or one of the major gadget e-commerce websites. If it is an issue, you might explore around websites like ebay.com or buy.com.

But what if you are not brand conscious and you just want a phone that runs the android operating system? There might be 100s of smart phones running on android and if you don’t have a preference you might have to read a lot before you eventually decide what make you are going to go for.

So in order to decide how much content your visitors need before purchasing your product or service you need to figure out

What drives your visitors to purchase the product or the service you are offering
How much information they need in order to make up their minds
How familiar they are with your product or service
How often they visit your website
How much trust and loyalty you enjoy among your audience

Once you have figured out these things you can easily make out after how much content or how many visits they will be ready to do business with you.

Content that is not optimized does not add value to your marketing

Optimizing content for search engines

I know this particular topic has been beaten to pulp by practically every “expert”, but surprisingly the majority of content publishers have no idea how to optimize their content for search engines. Search engine optimization is as important as generating quality content and publishing it regularly, if you want to target search engines for qualified traffic.

Here is how to optimize your content for search engines

Make a list of keywords and key phrases you think your prospective customers and clients are going to use in order to find your product or service on various search engines. It is very important that you leave your own judgement aside and think from the point of view of your customers (or clients). You can ask the help of your existing clients, you can use various keyword analysis tools available on the Internet and you can also hire qualified SEO experts to compile an exhaustive list of keywords and key phrases to focus on while creating your content.
Use the keywords and key phrases prepared in the above-mentioned list within the content you regularly generate. You can focus on three or four keywords at a particular time and keep generating content centered around them unless your search engine traffic has improved. Make sure you use your keywords and search terms contextually instead of simply stuffing them here and there. There is no well-defined density of keywords but use them as naturally as possible.
Use your primary key phrase in the title of your webpage or blog post. Your webpage title or blog post title is very important and that is why it appears highlighted as well as hyperlinked in the search engine results. Normally when people are using search engines they rarely use a single word or a keyword; they always use a phrase or a combination of different keywords. That is why construct a phrase that encompasses the real essence of your webpage or blog post and use that within the title.
Organize your content under various tags. Search engines look for the appropriate keywords within particular tags, such as

These are some fundamental search engine optimization vis-a-vis content steps that you can take in order to make sure that you can drive maximum traffic from search engines to your website or blog.

Optimizing your content for social media

The sharing dynamics of social media are a bit different from search engines. You have to focus more on the viral aspect of your content. So in order to optimize your content for social media it must be easily shareable, it must be highly interesting (not that your user content shouldn’t be highly interesting and informative), and it should be as concise as possible. This is not the case with every social media user but since almost everybody has highly active timelines they rarely get a chance to go through lengthy blog posts and articles. They are more inclined towards sharing videos, images, quick tips, slides and presentations.

Also, make your content easily shareable by using all the tools and add-ons available to you. You should also have a vibrant presence over selected social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, for example and consistently interact with your friends and followers so that whenever you post your content or updates they check it out in as many numbers as possible.

Optimizing your content is not a quick job. It happens over a long period of time. Whether you’re optimizing your content for search engines, for social media websites, or preferably, for both, it takes time and effort and above all consistency. Ideally the effort must begin even before you start implementing your content marketing strategy so that you have a ready platform by the time you start promoting your content.

Creating productive content

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Content marketing demands that you continuously create and publish quality content for your website. The primary purpose of creating content for your website or blog is making your visitors more aware of the qualities of the product or service you provide.

Somewhere publishers forget this basic purpose and simply start publishing content for the sake of improving search engine rankings, covering all the keywords and creating link bait content. Although these reasons are not out of line the problem manifests if these are the only reasons for which content is published. They might think they are doing something great for their business but actually they are not achieving much. There is a difference between random, aimless activity and actually being productive.

In order to carry out a more effective content marketing campaign you need to create productive content. What makes your content productive? It should achieve the following for you:

Educate your visitors about what you are offering
Make you stand out in comparison with your competitors
Inform your visitors of new developments vis-a-vis your products and services
Establish yourself as an authority in the subject dealing with your business and consequently help people trust you
Provide help textually, in audio or visually as much as possible so that they don’t have to call you or write to you in case they are facing a problem regarding some purchase or the usage of your product or service
Organically improve your search engine rankings so that people can easily find you for the right keywords
Maintain fruitful buzz around your online presence whether it is your own website/blog, on other websites or blogs (people linking to your content) or on your social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and YouTube
Act as a PR tool in case there is a misunderstanding or a communication gap, or even a smear campaign against your business

The features listed above make your content productive. They actually achieve the objectives defined in a well laid out content marketing strategy. Simply creating content based on your keywords and key phrases might get you some good traffic but you won’t be able to convert that traffic into business.

Creating productive content obviously requires more effort and sometimes also money, so you don’t need to rush. Take your time. Rather than publishing 5 blog posts or articles in a week, publish just a single article, but make it highly useful and productive. I guarantee you it will fetch you multiple times more traffic than your 5 articles/blog posts per week.

Why your website needs unique content

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This may sound mercantile coming from a professional content writer but your website definitely needs unique content, and in some cases, lots of it, if you want to have a competitive edge over other businesses, in terms of traction and search engine rankings.

Recently a client wrote to me that he simply wants to copy/paste content from other websites and I was amazed that even in these times people are unaware of the implications of plagiarism and publishing duplicate content on their websites and blogs. Fortunately I was able to convince him that straight copying/pasting content from other sources was a very bad idea and this could decimate his search engine optimization plans at the very least.

Why do you need unique content on your website or blog?

Simply because your business is unique, your voice is unique and so is your presence. If you have same sort of content like other websites and blogs how are people going to distinguish your presence from the others? What is going to be the difference? If you have got nothing unique and different to say about your business it means you have nothing different and unique to offer, and if you have nothing different or unique to offer why should people do business with you and not with someone else? And this can be a minor nag because people coming to your website or blog may not know that you don’t have unique content.

But the search engine algorithms will definitely know because that’s what they do: they rank well well-written and unique content and penalize duplicate and plagiarised content. You may ask why the heck they have a problem with non-unique content? It’s actually very simple. If they allow people to copy/paste each other’s content then all hell will break loose and very soon on every second link people will find the same content. Then what is the use of using a search engine? You use search engines to find relevant and useful content and you feel good when you get lots of choice. If the search engines don’t give preference to unique and relevant content you will stop using them and simply referred to a few odd directories.

Therefore it is in the interest of search engines to rank higher content that is unique and worthy.

Why your business needs a content marketing strategy

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Content marketing fundamentally means spreading your thoughts and messages through targeted content. Strategy comes in when you create content knowing exactly what you want to achieve. Randomly creating articles and blog posts may give you lots of content and it may also get you more traffic but in terms of conversion you won’t see good results because when you don’t know what to do with your content, neither do your visitors. Publishing content without a strategy is like throwing darts in the darkness hoping that one of them will hit the bull’s-eye.

Unless you have a massive advertising and PR budget content marketing is the best tool you have got. It is certainly not a one-week affair. Creating and implementing a content strategy takes time and effort but it is more effective and provides long-lasting results. Your business needs a well-defined content marketing strategy because

It keeps your regular communication focused
It shows your active involvement in your field
It helps you build an attentive community around your business
It turns your website or blog into an information resource
It improves your search engine rankings
It improves your conversion rate
It gets you quality incoming/inbound links
It turns you into an authority figure (authority figures are more trusted)
It gives a reason to your prospective customers and clients to stay longer on your website or blog
It strengthens your brand
It creates new communication channels
It builds a target audience that quickly responds to your questions and business ideas
You get immediate feedback from your clients, customers and visitors
You develop a ready-made product-launch platform