When a customer goes to your website, what are you hoping they focus on? The background colors and font choices? You want them to focus on the content – your articles, information, images and videos. The content of your website is what will bring people back…or make them never come back. There are several key ideas that will help you on the journey of content creation.
Quality vs. Quantity
Which sounds better – a few fast-food hamburgers, or one juicy, delicious steak? While it is a good idea to generate new, fresh content on a regular basis, don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. It is more enticing to consumers to have an informative article or blog written once a week than to have daily “I just had to put something up here today”. Providing value in your content is extremely important. Try to get into the mindset of your ideal audience – what do they want to see and read? What type of information do they need and want? Adding outside sources relevant to your content, such as quotes and links, will give it more credibility. Consumers can tell the difference between good and bad content, so save them and yourself a lot of time and trouble.
Appealing Content
Your blog post may be informative, but if it’s dull or difficult to understand, people won’t want to continue reading. If you are not excited about the content you are generating, chances are others won’t be either. Creating appealing content means writing for a broad audience, making it interesting and most importantly making it shareable. Appealing content results in engaged readers, who in turn will share your content, whether on social media sites, through email, or word of mouth.
Keep It Simple
Your content is competing with thousands of websites producing content on a similar topic. Your content is competing with thousands more websites showing videos of piano-playing cats, selling products, offering discounts…the list goes on. You are competing for the consumers attention in a world where people are busy and have information overload. So keep it simple! Organize your information in a way that helps people get to what they want to know, whether that means using subheadings or separating your content into several-part posts. Keeping your content short, to the point and easy to read will ensure people will absorb more of your information.
Whether your content is text, video, images or audio, make sure it incorporates these and other ideas to make it appealing, quality content that people will appreciate and share.
Additional articles:
Creating Quality Content
Content Marketing Tips
Branded Content
What would you add to this list?
