How to Craft Great Content

One of the most crucial elements of a website is the content that actually goes on the page. Great content can elevate a mediocre website into something extraordinary; it can convince and convert people who may have been on the fence about your business.

Focusing on your content is not a waste of time. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, while producing 3x as many leads. Those numbers are hard to ignore.

We’re going to talk about several ways to help make your content stand out, and how in doing so you can exponentially increase your results.

The truth about great content

Great content does several things:

• It influences the visitor’s perception of your company
• It provides value
• It helps the visitor make an informed decision about your business, service, or products

You are constantly battling to win over your visitors’ attention. Good content can be the difference between them staying on your site/committing to an action (whether it be buying from you, signing for your newsletter, whatever) and them hitting on the back button.

Great content will help with your SEO efforts. Skyrocket SEO’s 2014 study that I linked to determined that content marketing is one of the best ways to naturally build links to a website. Content marketing won the top spot for the most favored method of link building among the surveyed participants.

What is great content?

Great content is both valuable and authentic. For example, if you’re reading this post, you will extract some value from it. And hopefully you will understand that what I’m writing is authentic and will work for your business—otherwise, the entire concept of this blog post is meaningless.

You want your content to be devoured and to be shared across multiple social media platforms. The only way to accomplish this is to craft great content that your readers will want to read.

Valuable content is informative. If you run a blog or a newsletter, then there should be some good information that the reader can glean from it. There are lots of small business blogs out there that have no real interesting information to share. If you go on their blogs, you will notice that their posts are merely blurbs about their company/business and how great it is. This is not what readers want to read. If they spend to time to go to your blog, or if they have opted in for a newsletter, then you should deliver content that is informative and somewhat entertaining to read.

Crafting content that your visitors want to read

This can be very difficult for some business owners. For instance, if your business sells something mundane like lawn mowers or if you run an auto repair shop (or whatever), you may be wondering how to create interesting and informative content. These types of businesses seem, on the surface, very hard to write about, seeing that there is nothing exciting about them. But you need to think about the content from a different perspective.

From the outset, every single piece of content needs to be written from the point of view of “How can I help my readers? How can I help them find a solution and help them solve a problem?” Basically, you need to write helpful posts that will help our visitors with a problem that they may be having. If you’re an auto repair shop, instead of writing useless blog posts that do nothing but exalt your company, write something like “The Top 5 Most Common Car Issues that You May Have While on the Road, and How to Fix Them”. Or if you sell lawn mowers “The Best Way to Tend Your Yard on a Budget”.

You need to look at the demographics of your readership. Determine what type of content is relevant to your demographics and deliver it to them.

Look at what your competition is doing. If your competitor has a blog or a newsletter, look at their content, see what they’re writing about, and see how you can adapt their practices into your content. This is solely for inspiration. This will help you get ideas for your own website.

Great content is evergreen

Crafting great content is not short-term marketing. When you take the time to create highly-detailed, engrossing content for your business, you are subscribing to the philosophy of evergreen marketing. People will not stop devouring great content anytime soon. Integrate content creation into your marketing today—the results will be long lasting.