How to Make Great Content for Your Website
|Content runs the Internet. When people use search engines, they are looking for content. Whether it’s an informative article or an opinionated review, people digest a lot of online content. For your website to be successful, you need to make sure that you’re feeding your visitors’ appetite for great content. Once they get used to it, many website owners find the process of producing content to be quite enjoyable. If you don’t like writing, you can hire a freelance copywriter to produce content for you. However, regardless of which route you choose, it’s useful to know what factors make content great.
The first factor of great content is that it gives people what they want. The reason many personal blogs with personal stores that ramble on aren’t successful is because no one other than the person writing those stories cares about them. If you have an established website, you can use your own analytics data to figure out what your visitors want. If you’re working on a new website, there are free tools like Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool that will get you started in the right direction.
The next key to producing great content is that your content needs to talk to your audience. Far too many websites are filled with content that talks “at” visitors. Instead of engaging with readers, content that isn’t great simply announces information with no personality or engagement. Whether you write your content or hire a freelance copywriter to do it for you, make sure that the content is conversational. The great thing about writing content that is conversational is not only is it better, but it’s also more enjoyable to write.
While the next factor may seem obvious, there are plenty of website owners who forget about it. Great content needs to be interesting. Everything else aside, if content is dull, visitors aren’t going to stick around to read it. One of the best ways to make content interesting is to fill it with lots of facts. By presenting a lot of facts in a manner that is easy to read and digest, you can make content that is very appealing to visitors. People care about details, so don’t think that you need to gloss over these. Instead, dive right in and you’ll end up delivering a lot of value to your readers.
The finishing touch for great content is the way that you present it to your visitors. You should break your content up into easy to read paragraphs. Because many readers skim a lot of online content, you can use subheadings to help visitors quickly find the areas they’re most interested in reading. You can also spice up your content with relevant pictures. While usability studies have shown that pictures added simply for the purpose of decoration annoy visitors, if a picture enhances your content, it’s a great idea to add it. And keep in mind that a picture can be anything from a photo to a graph to an illustration.