People like watching stuff on YouTube – usually pretty dumb stuff. If you have the technical skills to make a video this might be the best sort of content for your site.
And your content doesn’t have to be dumb or go viral. It just has to be interesting to your intended audience.
For example, if you’re a manufacturer, clients might be interested in seeing how you do what you do. Obviously, you probably don’t want to make hour-long documentaries, but a two-minute video that takes people behind the scenes could work well.
Along with videos, you can put things like infographics, podcasts and even just plain old lists of things on your site. Again, think about the conversations you have with customers and what might be of interest to them and then decide what method works best.
Example: Jim Stewart talks about the ins and outs of search engine optimisation for his video blog on SmartCompany. The videos are basic, down-the-camera-barrel pieces that allow Stewart to talk directly to his audience about SEO matters. He takes what could be a very dry topic and makes it entertaining because he injects personality.
It’s very hard to engage with someone who’s too slick or too stiff and these traits can easily find their way into your content.
No, don’t take a leaf from Charles Bukowksi and down a bottle of Scotch before you write your next blog, but think about ways of injecting personality into your content.
This might take some time and you might have to feel your way, but it is a great way to get the conversational ball rolling in terms of your content – and that’s what you want, people entering into a conversation with you and your business. A lot of this also goes back to point two about tone.
Example: Tristan White is passionate about his business, The Physio Co, but he’s also passionate about his life, which includes his family. He puts it out there that he’s a proud husband and dad on his company website blog and in his blog for SmartCompany.
This approach is not right for everyone, and it depends on how comfortable you are with sharing information or meshing the lines between business and personal, but it does give readers a human face to a business. This human element can help engender trust and familiarity in a business exchange.
This should be obvious but can be quite elusive. Sometimes you might think particular things that happen in your business or that you put a lot of time into are going to be of endless fascination to your readers. This is probably not the case.
It’s not that different to being at a party and watching someone’s eyes glaze over as you recount the many ways you re-potted your cactus garden. It also might be great to boast about your business’s latest big win in the marketplace, but this is also probably of little interest to your customer other than as validation that you’re doing okay and can probably do a job for them.
So things of little interest are still okay to write about, but don’t blow it up and don’t make it the main game when it comes to your content. Your content should be primarily about things that matter to your reader. Or at the very least, things that are useful to your reader.
Example: Tracy Angwin writes a blog about payroll issues for SmartCompany. It’s a focused area and many of her blogs are functional or procedural in nature. Her readers are payroll professionals and her aim is to give them information about how to do their jobs better.
She’s identified what is useful to her readers and has applied her experience and knowledge to giving them easy to read information. Creating website content can start from this very basic premise.
