Blog Home

1 Way To Leverage The Value Of Your Content
Posted On: October 8th, 2010

A lot of clients want one thing from me: a website that will generate sales.

Whatever your business is trying to sell, one thing remains true: you need to develop a website that invites visitors to take action and become customers or clients. This is the #1 priority for many of my clients.

There are many things a website should and shouldn’t be, but for the purpose of this article we’ll look at the website that’s being developed for the sake of sales, and how you can leverage the value of your content to help achieve this goal.

Aside from all the social-media-community-building-advice-for-free hype that’s just about everywhere, the bottom line of any site is to benefit your business by way of increasing sales. So even though it’s vital to understand how and when to use tools like WordPress, Facebook and Twitter, there’s another part of effective website development that many clients overlook, and I like to call it the developing-a-site-that-pays-the-bills strategy (it’s your content!) .

The developing-a-site-that-pays-the-bills Strategy

Ok, so what is this strategy?  I always tell my clients that the old saying “content is king” can still be relevant today.  Even though an emerging idea among marketers and networks nowadays is that content isn’t as valuable as originally thought, I still tell my clients that it’s the written word combined with other media that will get an effective message across to your visitors.   If that message is crafted correctly, it should be motivating enough to generate sales and increase your bottom line.  Period.

One of the best ways to leverage the value of great content is to lose the watered down approach.  So don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  It’s typically not a good idea in any business scenario, and especially not for your website.

As an example, lets say you run John Doe’s General Contracting.  Your services look like the following:

• plumbing
• electrical
• drywall
• cabinetry
• interior painting & finishes
• interior decorating (your wife’s passion in the business)

When asked the question “ok Mr. Doe…how many opportunities do your visitors have to reach you online?” you might be quick to reply “once…through my website…”.  But this isn’t the right way to look at your website or your business at all.  In fact, the reason you are offering complimentary services is because you want to diversify and create new opportunities for business.

So why should your website be viewed any differently?

Based on the list above you have a minimum of seven unique opportunities for your visitors to find you (that’s six service niches and one home page).

Part of your website development strategy is to develop compelling, action-taking content for each of these pages, and to leverage your content on every page to optimize the chances of people finding you and discovering what you can do for them.

It’s your job to draft the content for every page of your website (you are the expert after all), injecting that content with keywords that pertain to only the subject of that page, adding in a call-to-action every chance you get, and then handing it over to your website developer for refining and enhancing (by adding compelling graphics, video, etc.).

Of course there are many other ways to optimize the value of your website.  This is just one example of something that you need to do.  It may be an oldie, but I still get enough clients missing the point of effective and complete content that it’s warrants another discussion.

SHARE

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 2:16 am and is filed under Branding Ideas & Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Want to share this article with your readers? Feel free - no edits please and be sure to use my resource box at the end of the article you are sharing. Thanks!