Here's #10 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #10:
Great Web content is dynamic and changing.

Your business is constantly changing. (If you were in a static industry, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog.) New opportunities are emerging. Prospects have new questions and concerns that must be addressed. So your website can’t be static.

News releases are dynamic content—and they give you an often-overlooked way to leverage more traffic to your website. “Getting coverage for your business in mainstream media can be hugely beneficial in bringing a swathe of new visitors to your site, and building inbound links from the media and from all the other people who comment on it,” writes Internet marketing consultant Ken McGaffin.

Every time you create a significant new information paper, write a release and send it out on a wire service.

A related tip: If you have to rely on IT to keep your website current with fresh content, you might be in trouble. Invest in a content management system.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #9 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #9:
Great Web content is interactive.


Use cool tools as “link bait”—something other sites will read about and want to link to. For instance, create a handy web-based calculator for a need common to your audience. Maybe it’s a mortgage comparison calculator for borrowers. Or an ROI calculator for software buyers. Or a calculator to help farmers determine how much herbicide to mix.

Other potential tools could include color selectors, product selectors, or video demos. Whatever the tool is, just make sure it’s “cool,” relevant and well-publicized.

The use of video content in Internet marketing is soaring. YouTube has found that 37 percent of its users have purchased something offline that they saw advertised on YouTube. The company offers this advice to marketers who want to make effective use of video:

• “Just because you have video doesn’t mean it’s good or meaningful to the people in your market. Either modify it so it is, or don’t use it.”

• “Check everything you intend to post on YouTube to make sure it represents your brand and moves your mission forward.”

TechTarget’s “2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2: Closing the Gap.” also confirmed that technology buyers are using social communities in the decision-making process. “A very high percentage of the buyers indicated they now consider social communities to be one of the major places they'd go for information on the Web,” said Marilou Barsam, senior VP-corporate and client marketing at TechTarget.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, social network content, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #8 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #8:
Great Web content is easy to find and easy to scan.

According to David Talbott, a content expert at Studio B, most people who find your content won’t go on to read it unless it passes their scan test. What will pass? Talbott calls it “brain-friendly” content.

“You can force your brain to do things you need to do, like read a boring white paper the boss sent you, but that’s hard work. Brain-friendly content gives brains what they need, so that they keep reading.”

Any content you control—whether it is an email, a white paper, a landing page, or a product page—should be inviting to read. No dense paragraphs or endless scrolls. Use lots of subheads, bulleted lists, callouts, sidebars, charts and photos with captions, and other devices that break up the pages and help the reader determine whether the full text is worth reading.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Maybe it's New Year's resolutionism that is inspiring content marketers in the blogosphere to confront their norms. Several posts this week throw down the gauntlet.

• Copyblogger reports: "Dragon Slaying 101: How to Use Heroic Language to Battle Boring Copy". It's an engaging post on using the metaphors of the heroic quest to invigorate blogs and articles.
• Steve Woodruff, in "Disperse the Jargon Cloud," Steve Woodruff reminds us why we get lulled into using jargon, and what to do about it.
• MarketingProfs reposted a thoughtful article by Dana Vanden Heuven,"Thought Leaders Should Violate Expectations." He describes the characteristics that separates true thought leaders from the jargon slingers.
  

Here's an excerpt from Dana Vanden Heuven's "Thought Leaders" post:

Violating may sound like a harsh word. In fact, its original meaning, that is "to break or disregard" is so often overshadowed by the more malicious definitions that we often see it associated with. (see, expectations at work right there. Think of the first thing that came to mind when you way the word "violate" in the title―I bet it wasn't pretty.) However, when thought leaders violate expectations, they simply break the mold and deliver an unexpected insight, action idea, nugget of information or the all important "Aha! moment" that resets your thinking to their frequency and puts you on a different plane.

Here's a New Year's toast: may we violate expectations, battle mediocrity, and slay dragons in 2010.

Labels: confusing corporate writing, content marketing, web copy writing

Here's #6 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #6:
Great Web content is emotional. It raises the hairs a bit.

Whether you’re selling financial services to consumers or databases to businesses, remember: Companies don’t buy things; people do. So their purchase decisions are influenced by more than steel-trap logic and facts.

“Since we all buy with our emotions first and our rational minds second, you’ve got to uncover the emotional reasons for buying your products and services, or you’ll just be competing on price—a bad place to be,” says Web copywriter Sid Smith. “A strategy built around satisfying your customer’s emotional needs works far better than one focused solely on lead generation ‘tactics.’”

Good content gets the reader involved personally. Look for ways to put the reader into the story. Perhaps her inspired purchase of your product will earn kudos from her peers. Or maybe the content shows a family man how your product or service will give him more time with his wife and children.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #5 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #5:
Great Web content is search-engine friendly--while communicating effectively.

Recently I've blogged about how marketers are being tempted to crank-out content to satisfy increasingly voracious search engines. At the end of the day, people, not search engine spiders,
are the ones reading your content. Market leaders know this, and place a premium on content that doesn't just rank, but communicates.

Search engine marketing specialist Todd Miechiels writes: “Companies everywhere want to throw money at search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) in hopes of getting their share of the new, less-costly-to-acquire customers that Internet marketing has promised.

“The truth is, without content—and I mean good content that clearly communicates, persuades and inspires—a good amount of search marketing dollars are wasted. A lot of companies get lazy on the content development side, which turns a pretty low risk marketing channel into a pretty sure bust.”

Also check out the advice of Aaron Wall in his article, “If People Hate Your Writing, Google Hates Your Website.” He writes, “Content without links only works if you operate in an undiscovered or uncompetitive niche. … If you point a few more quality links at a real content page, it will rank far better and be far more profitable than a hand-crafted page that was created exclusively for bots.”

In other words, it’s important for content to be spider-friendly—but that is a secondary objective. It’s far more crucial that your content is written for people and packaged for people.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.
illustration credit

Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #4 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #4:
Great Web content is should be repurposed.

Copyblogger's recent post, "How to Do Less and Get More," applies to web content and marketing in general. Marketers who frequently rework and rewrite their message might believe they are "keeping it fresh," but they are muddying the waters.

Just because you put something “out there” once doesn’t mean that the target audience saw it, so you need to keep pushing out the same messages—with new twists and fresh formats.

The Internet is perfect for repurposing content. Take a white paper, for example. (Take this white paper, specifically.) You can turn it into several shorter articles. Then, perhaps using an interview format, turn each article into a podcast. Make a video of podcast interviews and distribute it on YouTube.

Get ideas for email subject lines from bullet points and subheads in brochures, case histories and webinar presentations. Issue press releases on new white papers and webinars. Include an image of the paper’s cover so that search engines will index it, too.

These are just a few ways of repurposing content. Go through your “inventory” of content, and you’ll think of many more.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #2 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

In his post, "Five reasons your content is damaging your brand," Kevin Gibbons writes that in the rush to perform search engine optimization, marketers are defeating what should be their primary objective: building of their brand. The bottom line is that readers seek content to learn something--not to be pitched to, or to raise the click-through rate of a link. Anything less than good content frustrates the reader and destroys the brand, no matter what the Web analytics say.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #2:
Great Web content recognizes intent.
First and foremost, content must have a value proposition that appeals to what the person wants, and it must be respectful of the reader's relationship to the brand. Pushing for an in-person demo, for example, is appropriate for someone who is in buying mode, but it is a turn-off to a person who just entered the sales funnel. Some lead generation experts equate the latter situation with proposing marriage on the first date. In the early stages of the sales cycle, buyers are learning the marketing landscape. They want an education, not a solicitation.

Technical buyers consume online media throughout their process, according to TechTarget’s “2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2: Closing the Gap.” They favor specific content at specific parts of the sales cycle, the study found. For example, buyers visit online communities for information in the early stages of the buying process. In the middle of the cycle, Webcasts are popular. Buyers like demos in the second and final stages.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #1 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

There is a lot of tweeting about tweeting--and all the other ways that social media are changing the ways we work and think. But at the heart of it all, every tweeter needs great content to tweet. (Retweeting everybody else's great content is easy, but it separates the thought followers from the thought leaders. Thought leaders originate the tweet.)

In this series of posts, we'll take a close look at "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content" to examine what separates a tweet from a retweet.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #1:
Great Web content is written with a target reader in mind.
For content to succeed, the authors must pick a clear target. One size does not fit all. Good content is highly segmented. That means if you need 200 pages on your website instead of 20, do it.

Search engine marketing specialist John Waddy of TwentySix2 Marketing constantly emphasizes this point. “If you figure out why people are coming to your website and address their needs and their likely questions up-front, you have a much better chance of converting them to the desired call to action,” says Waddy.

To entice their target readers with valuable content, Web marketers need only follow the basic practice of SEO: create a page for each key phrase that readers search. This simple approach ensures the right content gets covered, as well as found. People search, people find, people read. And when your content answers the questions your target readers are asking, they don't have to leave your site to look elsewhere.

If your site needs to optimize 200 key phrases to answer the target readers' questions, then creating great content for those 200 pages is a sound investment.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

I started to to try to write some commentary of my own about the article linked below, but the article itself really says it all. Be sure to watch the video (you'll have to follow the link from this page to YouTube.com).

Writers: The Most Undervalued People Online, by Robert Gorrell, on grokdotcom.com

My first experience writing for the web was in a small technology company that suddenly needed its first World Wide Web site, as everybody did, in 1995-6. The VP of Marketing assembled a SWAT team consisting of a project manager, a CGI programmer, and a graphic artist. So I asked him, "What's this new web site going to say?" He added me to the team.

Labels: web copy writing