How often are you adding new content to your website?
If you’re like most business owners and marketing teams we speak to, you’re likely in one of three categories:
- You don’t create any content at all
- You started creating content but that slowly faded
- You regularly produce content and see the results
It’s all too easy to be disheartened by content marketing if you haven’t seen a positive impact.
Unlike advertising, content isn’t always created to deliver an immediate result.
The return on effort can take some time to bear fruit.
For example, we produced a web design pricing guide to help our clients and prospects get a ball park of how much they should budget for a professional website.
Publishing this content did not have an immediate impact.
However, this content has been used and referred to many times by our prospects, clients and internal team to help guide pricing conversations.
Our prospects have appreciated the transparency in pricing and it’s been a big time saver for our team to give website pricing estimates.
This pricing guide continues to be referred to an updated over time so it stays accurate and relevant.
The performance of this one page in search engines also continues to improve over time, as illustrated below:
This kind of content that increases in value over time is call a “Content Asset”.
Contrast this to something like a tweet on Twitter, which has an average lifespan of a about 18 minutes.
The content that you add to your website has a much longer lifespan.
When you create a piece of content for your website, such as a blog post, this is an asset for your business that increases in value over time.
Your content will usually be created to help your potential customers to answer a specific problem or query that they have.
As another example, if you sell commercial garden maintenance, you might consider creating content about “things to consider when choosing a landscaping service”.
Your article could link to booking in a call or recommended products that an interested person could then go on to purchase.
As you’re looking to help people with the content that you create, you’re ideally hoping for it to rank highly in the search results.
What this means is that when someone searches about a specific problem, you want them to see and click-through to the content that you’ve created.
One of the great things about search engines is that they do pay attention when you’re regularly creating content.
If you’re releasing new content each week or month, then you’ll often start seeing quicker SEO results.
Instead of thinking about content as a chore or something that must deliver an immediate result, instead think about it as an asset.
It helps to create and grow stronger relationships with your audience.
Content is always selling for you. It’s a powerful tool that can continue to bring visitors to your website for a long time.
Of course, you might not have time or the ability to create content.
That’s perfectly understandable as most business owners are busy people who already have a full schedule.
But that doesn’t mean that your business can’t create content at all.
You can either employ a team member to create content or work with an external partner who will create content for your business.
One of the ways that we work efficiently with our clients to create content is to interview them via a video or voice call.
We can usually get a lot of content in a short period of time, which our content team can then use to produce blogs, sales pages and social media posts.
If you’re not sure what to create, then start by answering real questions that your clients have.
Take note of client questions this week, answer them on your blog next week, and then share this content with your audience via email and social media.
This is a great way to get started with content marketing, add real value to your target market, and to stand out from your competitors.
