Tag Archives: Content Writing

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

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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.

Writing content for B2B websites

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Most B2B websites – if they want to incorporate content marketing into their overall marketing strategy – should have lots of informative content on their websites aside from the usual business content.

A slight problem is some executives and decision makers are too busy to go through lengthy chunks of text and some want to do lots of reading before they can decide in your favor. So you have to keep your business partners in mind while creating content for your B2B website.

To handle this problem you can either organize your content in such a manner that it can be contracted and expanded according to convenience, or you can create excerpts and detailed descriptions separately and your prospective business partners can go through them according to their preference. But be sure that even in your excerpts you provide all the necessary information that they require in order to make a decision. Preparing an excerpt doesn’t mean you leave the critical details.

You also need to be well versed with the language within your business sector. Professionals working within your particular niche are used to certain jargons and terminologies and they also have phrases that make them feel more comfortable while going through your content. If you really want to convince them that you are the person or business they ought to be working with then you have to speak their language. It is not as difficult as it sounds. If you are a professional well-versed with your industry lingo there is no problem, but if you’re totally new a little bit of research can help you. A language is after all a language, you just need to use some words here and there to convey that you are writing as an insider.

In order to achieve this you can create a separate list of words and expressions that are common in that particular business. Then practice using those words and expressions while creating random sentences and paragraphs (but make sure that they make sense). Very soon you will feel comfortable talking in a language particular to a B2B section.

This will also help you search engine optimize your B2B content because professionals belonging to that business use particular terminologies and search expressions.

Writing content for B2B websites is not markedly different from writing for other websites (technology, general interest, news, etc.) you just need to get acquainted with the language and you must also know what the decision-makers want to read before going ahead with the business.

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.

The effectiveness of content marketing can be measured in terms of before and after

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Measuring effectiveness of content marketing strategyIt is not often possible to understand exactly how content is impacting your bottom line: are you doing more business due to your content marketing effort?  There is no hard and fast rule and it is extremely difficult to track individual pages and blog posts and then make out how much business they are bringing in.  So how do you rationalize the implementation of the content marketing strategy or how do you monitor its effect?

There is one established fact that content marketing works; what you have to find out is  whether it is working for you or not.  Content marketing is not like a traditional marketing campaign where you just create an ad and then use TV, newspapers and magazines, and websites to disseminate that ad and then analyze various metrics.  This doesn’t work in the case of content marketing.  More than a push marketing it is a pull marketing and it spreads over the long span of time and effort.

So you can have a before  and after scenario that is working for many people with tremendous results.  What was your overall revenue before you implemented your content marketing strategy, or what is your current revenue when you are just about to implement content strategy.  Is there a change, say, during the past four months, ever since you have been paying close attention to your content marketing strategy? This change, if it is there, becomes your metrics that you can use to gauge the success or failure of a particular content marketing plan.

This works in conjunction with shorter, more focused plans.  Take for instance user engagement.  You know you can increase your sales by encouraging use of engagement on your website/blog and also on your social media profiles.   You also know that up till now nothing much has happened.  For user engagement you need engaging content.  So focus on this.  Try to come up with content that encourages your visitors to engage in conversations with you. What drives them? What motivates them?  What excites them?

Not getting enough traffic?  It must be an SEO issue but it may also be due to the fact that you don’t have the right kind of content.  Even if you feel you have got tons of content are you focusing on the right keywords?  Even if you feel that you are focusing on the right keywords are you really covering the keywords that your target customers and clients use?

These are smaller issues (not smaller on their own but in terms of the end result: increasing your revenue) and you can begin with them so that you can measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.  When you see more and more people coming to your website and when you see that they are engaging in conversations with you and among each other (talking about your business, or at least its object/topic related to your business) you know that you have an effective content marketing strategy working for you.

10 ways to get regular content for your website or blog

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Continuous writing

To be successful on the Internet you constantly need to communicate with written words. Written words – the content on your website or blog – constantly convey your thoughts to your visitors. They attract new visitors and keep the old visitors hooked to your writing. But this also involves writing regularly. The more regular you are, the greater is the level of interaction and communication. Agreed, networking and interacting on other blogs and online forums do play a vital part, eventually it is your content that wins you the day.

Unless you have ideas of encyclopedic dimensions it is very difficult to come up with new ideas and new matter on a daily basis. You can do this without external help if this is the only thing you do: thinking about and generating content for your blog or website. But if you have only got, say between half-an-hour to one hour, to think about what to write, collect your thoughts and plan them and then write them down, it becomes an uphill task and often gets assigned to the back burner. Here are a few things that can help you get regular content for your website or blog:

  1. Hire a content writer or a team of writers: You can hire writing services according to your budget but this is the best option if you have no time to research and write content for your blog or website. The person that you hire most probably has experience researching online and coming up with fresh and relevant content. This doesn’t mean that you assign the entire responsibility of creating content for your blog a website to your content writer, you will need to constantly keep a vigil and make sure that the content tallies with the fundamental philosophy of your blog or website.
  2. Subscribe to RSS feeds: There can be an information overload when you are subscribed to too many RSS feeds but your RSS feeds subscriptions can prove to be the best resource to get fresh writing ideas. You just need to stick to the most important blogs and content websites while tracking your RSS feeds. Don’t rush while subscribing because this will eventually lead you to around 1000+ subscriptions and the mere number will dissuade you from even opening your RSS reader. Subscribe to RSS feeds judiciously and follow them closely in order to get fresh updates.
  3. Use blog search: Many search engines, including the good old Google let you conduct searches on various blogs. You can use your favorite search term to check what all people are writing on it and then come up with your own content accordingly.
  4. Read about your topic: Reading gives you lots of writing ideas as it fills your mind with your thoughts and wisdom. Whether you agree with what you are reading or not you have something to say, either pro or against. Reading also expands your knowledge-base and the more you know the more comfortable you get writing on your topic. Read books relevant to your field, read blogs and websites that talk about your topic, and interact on online forums. Of course you will need to keep a tab on your time in case you don’t have much time to spare.
  5. Visit content aggregation websites: Content aggregation websites such as popurl.com, alltop.com, digg.com, etc. publish lots of highly relevant and contextual links with great regularity. Make it a point to visit these content and aggregation websites routinely. It is better if you can go to them at least once a day but you can decide your schedule according to your work schedule.
  6. Interact as much as you can: Regular interaction exposes you to newer opinions and varying ideas. Interact with people who are already doing great things in your field. For instance if you want to write about blogging then you should try to regularly interact with people who are successful bloggers. You can use social media networking websites like Twitter and FaceBook to keep track of the ongoing conversations. For these social media networking websites there are many online tools that help you track conversations according to topics and keywords. Actively participate in these forums. But be sure of what you are communicating.
  7. Use your existing content for new ideas: Many of your existing blog posts and articles may carry further topics and subtopics. Sometimes an entire article can be created out of one subheading. For instance, if you wrote a blog post on the benefits of regular blogging you might have written about using blogging as a great blogging tool and you might have written just one paragraph on the topic. Why not write a complete blog post or an article on that?
  8. Invite your visitors to give you ideas: Lots of bloggers ask their visitors what they would like to read on the blog. I think this is a great way of getting new writing ideas because after all the most difficult part of writing regularly is getting writing ideas. Once you have a topic it is much easier to come up with the content. You can ask your visitors to give ideas regarding what they would like to read on your blog or website through the comments section.
  9. Maintain an ideas file: Ideas are like the sparkling fireflies; they happen randomly and unless you have reached Nirvana, you can hardly control them. It is always better to devise a mechanism to preserve them whenever they grace you. You should maintain an ideas file and keep storing ideas whenever they occur so that you can refer to it whenever you need to get some new writing ideas.
  10. Be passionate about your topic: Your mind brims with new and exciting ideas when you are passionate about the theme of your blog or website. Your passion helps you focus and work harder towards collecting your thoughts and expressing them; people can feel the passion in your words and expressions. But can you be passionate about something you are not comfortable with? This dilemma is often faced by professional writers because they have to write on myriad topics with unwavering interest. How do they keep the flame of passion burning all the time? They derive their passion from the fact that they have to write well no matter on what they are writing. In a similar manner you can seek passion in your topic too.

Aside from these activities you can also syndicate content from various organizations that provide regular content to blogs, online magazines, online newspapers and websites.

When you regularly update your website or blog it shows that you are serious about talking to your visitors. It doesn’t always have to be prim and proper and you can be especially yourself on your blog provided you are not discussing your pyjama parties and doggy excursions all the time on your Internet marketing blog; the content should always be relevant to your theme and must always have a target audience.