Everyone who has a digital presence, no matter how small or large it may be, needs to ensure it revolves around content. Content is key to your success – it really is that simple.
However, there is a little more to it. Your content needs to be of a high quality. Anyone can put together a couple of hundred words, but not everyone can do so in a way that\’s going to have the desired impact on your audience.
In fact, we\’d go as far as saying that the majority of people, when they actually sit down in front of a computer to produce a page of website content or a blog post will actually find it more difficult than they first realise.
A lot of the reasoning behind this is because there\’s a huge amount of information to take into account; information that if not understood properly or is ignored, can mean you end up with content that doesn\’t have any positive impact.
So what is some of this information? What are the key traits to writing content that simply won\’t convert?
1. Not specific to the audience
The most notable quality of poor content is that it\’s not related to the audience. It isn\’t relevant to what they\’re looking for and as such, whilst it may, by chance, be of interest to some, most aren\’t going to enjoy it.
And if they\’re not enjoying it, how can they ever be expected to convert into a customer?
2. A poor, unrelated headline
Something that relates largely to blog posts, a lot of people will see the title before they see anything else. Therefore, you need to spend a lot of time ensuring it\’s as attractive as it can be, as it\’s these dozen words that can encourage people to click through and read the post in full.
However, whilst the title does need to be attractive, it also needs to be relevant to the blog post as a whole. If it\’s not, people may click through, but they\’re likely to bounce off quickly, leaving them with somewhat of a sour taste as they may feel they\’ve been \’duped\’ into clicking through to read something that they\’re not actually interested in.
3. Delivering quantity over quality
There are plenty of resources out there that explain the more content you can publish, the better it is. From press releases and whitepapers through to blog posts and website content, in theory, the more content you can produce, the greater the impact will be on your digital strategy.
But it can\’t be to the detriment of the content\’s quality. Quality must ALWAYS come first when you\’re producing content – and if it doesn\’t, you\’re going to find that although you\’re able to produce dozens of new pieces of content every week, they\’re having very little impact on your bottom line.
Content is vital to your online success, but if you\’re not producing it correctly, it can actually have the opposite effect.
Plan your content properly, understand your audience and by producing great content as and when you can, you should be able to be confident that every single word published has the impact you genuinely need it to have.
Image: jkim1 (Flickr)