The eBiz Blog

By now, you realize that online, content is king. Without it there is nothing to entice people to visit your site. But with so much content online - there are literally billions of websites, blogs, articles, photos and more for potential customers to consume - if you want to really stand out, your content has to be great. If it’s not great, your customers will not engage with it or your company, won’t share it and they may not even come back. In other words, if you don’t have good content, you won’t see the results you want from your website.

So how do you improve your content?

1. Know Your Audience

Knowing your customers requires more than typical information on age and gender. Obviously that’s important - you’ll write differently for 45-year-old women than you will for 18-year-old boys - but having more insight into who they are and their behaviors can help you tailor your content to their needs. Use your site’s analytics to determine what they are searching for, how long they are staying on your site, and how they are sharing content. By analyzing consumer behavior, you can better tailor your content.

2. Ignore SEO

“What!?” you may be thinking. “Ignore SEO? But how will people find me?” I’m not suggesting that you ignore SEO forever, but when you’re drafting your content, focus on creating good content first and SEO second. Too many people make the mistake of building their entire post or article around keywords, inserting them willy-nilly and repeatedly. This will not only annoy your readers, it won’t help your content show up higher in search results. So write naturally, focusing on creating compelling content that people want to share and link to, and you’ll see your search rank improve.

3. Give People Something They Can Use

Readers want content they can use. Whether they want to get more customers, bake a better soufflé or lose 20 pounds, they’re hungry for information that will help them do more and do it better. When you’re creating content, ask yourself how this information will benefit your readers. If it doesn’t benefit them, write something else.

4. Use Guest Bloggers

Guest bloggers, whether experts in your field, other bloggers or simply customers and fans, can breathe new life into your content, offering new ideas and perspectives that you may not have developed on your own. They can also bring with them an entirely new audience, so let others do the heavy lifting once in a while.

5. Use Infographics

I recently read an article noting that more and more people are turning to infographics for their information. It makes sense. Infographics are easily digestible, easily shareable and when done well, fun to read. Adding infographics can help you present your information in a more appealing way and will increase the chance of your content being shared.

The online world changes every day and what grabs someone’s attention today will be old news by tomorrow. But if you constantly work on making your content - and your one-of-a-kind site - the best it can be, you not only will keep your customers coming back for more, they’ll most likely bring some friends along with them.