V A Donnelly

It can’t be said enough … good original content is necessary for the success of a website. Without it, you will not be able to attract search engines or customers.

Long gone are the days when adding 30 key terms to the Meta tags was pretty much what you did to win page rank in Google. Search engines now look at the total sum of the written content on your site; the page titles, sub-titles, paragraphs, image names and captions that appear on the page, and they are looking for that content to be relevant to what you sell. Content is King

The challenge for many small businesses is that they do not have budgets that allow for hiring web copywriters, photographers or graphic designers to continually produce content for the website. Luckily for your customers, you already have that meaningful information. Start looking for the content in your own company.

1.) Listen to the Voices Inside
The people in your company who sell and support your products and services are an important source of your website content. Capture insightful comments about your companys’ products and services from employee’s. Staff can supply founatins of content, ask them to get involved.

2.) Talk to Customers
Ask your prefered clients to write three … just three … sentences on each of your major offerings. Encourage them to share thier thoughts on how, when and why they use your products and services.

3.) Talk to Suppliers
Similarly ask your vendors and suppliers what they think of your latest feature release, its unique value and the time it took to ship, because you are interested in improving the relationship with them. But while you are capturing that important information, also listen for the words they use to describe what you do for them. They will use key words and phrases that other potential customers will likely use while searching for your business.

4.) Get Shooting
If you sell products manufactured by other companies, your sales rep with that company may be a source of content to you. Ask your sales rep if there are product descriptions, photos, videos, line drawings or other digital materials that you can use. One note of caution; you do not want your entire web site to consist of content you have received from the manufacture simply because you will likely have identical content to all other distributors who did the same thing. But when interspersed with original content you create yourself, supplier info can bring a lot of value to your site.

5.) Save Digital Copies
If you do use an ad agency or freelancer to create other marketing materials, make sure you get digital versions of all the content for your webs site, preferably as source files.

Once you get into the habit of looking for content as you go about your day, you’re going to stumble across other tricks that are specific to you and your business. Share them with us here in the comments; we’re always interested in hearing what you have to say.

Tagged as: Content, internet, Small Business, Technology, Web Content, Website

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There’s nothing better than a fired-up client … a client eager to spend resources and energy on doing smart things in a smart way … a client ready for results and willing to do what it takes to get them.

And there’s nothing worse than having to tell that client to holster it back up because they aren’t ready to pull the trigger.

That is sometimes the situation we find ourselves in when our small business clients are interested in implementing social media strategies before they have made sure that the location they are driving traffic to – usually their Web site – is prepared to handle the traffic.

When it comes to marketing their own brand, many small- and mid-sized businesses are working with limited resources. So a decision to increase focus in one area often inadvertently becomes a decision to decrease attention in another.

Embarking on a social media strategy is a major undertaking for any company, an effort that often manages to soak up a lot of internal resources. This can mean that the more mundane efforts it takes to update the company Web site can often go ignored, leaving the place you are trying to drive more traffic to looking something less than its best. Why is this a problem? Because social media efforts are just a means to an end, with your final goal being to convert traffic into sales.

It’s important that the first step of your social media strategy be taking a look at your Web site and making sure it is an effective end-destination for every tweet, blog post and shared video.

Are there clear “calls to action” throughout your Web site?
Are your products and service pages current, accurate and complete?
If you are targeting a specific audience with specific services/products needs in your social media efforts, are those services/products easily found?
Are your contact pages updated and complete? Is it easy for customers to continue the dialog that you started with a social media vehicle?
Is your Web site content of interest to your social media audiences?

Pages that need simple corrections should be taken care of right away. Any section that needs more extensive effort should be avoided as landing pages for social media traffic. Once you are comfortable that your Web site is ready and able to do handle the new traffic, your company can feel comfortable in taking its first shot at social media success.

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