Having a website is an essential business tool nowadays if you want to succeed and stay ahead of the game. But having a good-looking site is no longer enough, you need to push it further and actively drive your company forward by attracting customers to your site. If you need a hand in how to create better online content for your website then keep reading.
The Internet makes it easy to extend the reach of excellent content, by creating a trans-media (multi-platform) experience you can build one initial effort to offer many different ways to engage.
- Create an ultimate guide
Ultimate guides perform well because they gather all of the information on a given topic in one simple place. Your content’s USP (Unique Selling Point) is a very easy sell. Whenever people mention that particular topic on their site, they can link to your ultimate guide. After all, you created that ‘go to’ resource. Some of the best ideas are taken from everyday experience.
Finding ideas that can produce ultimate guide content is easy. It means thinking hard about what your brand, product, or service stands for, and how we might relate it interestingly to our experiences. Think, everyday experiences, how they connect with your company, and create an ultimate guide. For example, ‘the ultimate guide of how to survive a day at the office’.
- Create long list posts
Everybody loves a list post, especially a long list post. When someone sees a post like ‘100 ways to save money’ they automatically think that this must be an amazing, engaging list before they’ve even read the first sentence. So the next time you write a list post, up your game so that your list has a dramatically big number at the beginning of it. It takes a lot more work and time to write a ‘top 100 ways’ list, but it will pay off when your piece of content is being shared daily by people viewing your website. And the more shares, the more clicks on your site.
- Use visual content
Humans love images and visuals. The fact is, images—in the form of infographics, diagrams, interactive images, quizzes, puzzles, and games—tend to outperform their text-based counterparts. A large population of the world are visual learners, so information that is published in a visual format will satisfy a large user-base. When thinking about visual content think about design. The internet has made us lazy, we now have short attention spans, and if a website doesn’t instantly grab us we will click off of it. Graphics and images can now be bigger and better and are a key part of establishing and reinforcing your brand identity. Don’t forget, it has been scientifically proven that the brain favours color over black and white – so pick your images accordingly.
- Include data and studies
There’s no denying it: people love to share data. Whether its data on the average person’s shoe size, the number of calories in a meal, or the most retweeted tweet, unique data spreads like wildfire on the web. And you don’t need to be a scientist to get your hands on unique data. Online surveys are now easy to use, cheap, and give you enough data that you can easily publish your results in the form of a blog post, infographic, or press release. Think of any interesting topic or question and create a survey out of it. It’s easy.
- Use your audience as Case Studies
There’s a small secret behind blogs that grow like there’s no tomorrow: They publish insanely useful content that actually provides value to their target audience. Content that actually gives people a solution to a problem will beat opinion articles 99 times out of 100. To be able to create such content, you must first identify problems that your target audience is having, whether it’s filing their complex tax returns or losing weight. Engage with them online on your social media sites to find out, invite them to respond to you, then provide a step-by-step solution to those problems and post a link to your content on your social media sites.
5 Ways to Create Better Online Content was first published by Jo Booth, a social media expert and trainer over at Social Media Makes Sense.Original SEO Content by SEOAndy @ 5 Ways To Create Better Online Content
