Having a sharp, user-friendly, informative website for your new, loyal, and potential clients adds to your credibility as an expert and to your visitors' convenience when seeking to contact you or learn more about how your particular products and services can help them achieve their goals. It does not matter if your business specializes in selling widgets, repairing skateboards, or creating websites, the content, or copy, on your website needs to be well-written (with your reader in mind) and fresh (frequently nurtured with new ideas, articles, and blogs!)
Here are 4 points to keep in mind when considering the content for your website.
1) Add New Content Each New Day. Adding original content to your website inspires clients and visitors to return to your site on a regular basis! By consistently providing interesting, updated, and helpful information about your particular niche (whether it be acupuncture, business plan writing, or K9 training), you are demonstrating expertise in your industry and adding value to a client's current or future investment in your services. A regularly updated blog is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing kit.
Current, informative, and creative feature articles on your business and/or industry enables you to demonstrate your expertise, share valuable tips and advice, and build relationships with potential clients on a regular basis. Adding fresh content to a website several times each week is an arduous and time-consuming task that demands discipline, commitment, and creativity--even for a seasoned copywriter! (The difference, of course, between a business owner and a copywriter providing the content for the website is that the writer loves writing copy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the business owner would rather focus his/her attention and time elsewhere in the business and life!)
2) Get The Right Writer For Your Website's Words. Hiring a truly effective, talented, and experienced writer requires some investigation and time; however, once you find a dependable and exceptional writer, you will immediately be able to reap the benefits of the words she has sown for your site! Of various questions to ask a writer you may be interested in hiring to create content for your site, an important one is: Will YOU personally be writing the content or will you be outsourcing it?
99.99% of the "copywriters" out there (especially the ones who advertise themselves as website developers (first), are outsourcing your work. This means that if they are charging you $50 per article, they are keeping $40 of that and paying an inexperienced wordsmith somewhere overseas maybe $10. A talented writer who will focus on your business should earn anywhere from $75 and up per article. (Remember, once that blog or feature piece is posted on your site, it is advertising that will continue to generate income for you 24/7, 365 days a year.)
Another way self-proclaimed "copywriters" outsource your business is by buying "Private Label Rights" packages for $5 bucks and then taking the 25 poorly-written articles in those packages and refurbishing them to sell them to you. Do not get caught up in this hamster wheel; don't have one company do everything for you (design your website, market your site, AND write all your content). If you are going to hire a writer to be the "voice" of your authentic content, be sure to ask if he/she does the work personally. Be sure to peruse their website and see if they promote the use of PLR anywhere on it; if they do, that means they advocate passing someone else's work off for their own and thus don't know the first thing about creating content from scratch for you (or don't care).
Further, if the company you hire to write your content for you makes you go to a "different" website to log in to view the content they are "preparing" for you, this is a sure sign they have outsourced it. The writer should be personally emailing you the content to proof from the writer's email address, not redirecting you to some "neutral" place to view it.
3) Fresh and Frequent Content Gets Found in the Search Engines! Authentic and new copy (that you write yourself or hire a professional writing firm to craft for you) will increase your website's chance of being indexed higher in non-paid search results if it is written for search engine optimization. Also referred to as "organic" search engines, examples of these free means of driving traffic to your site include: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. When surfers/potential customers "Google" your company's products or services, you want your website to be one of the top sites listed on page one of their search! These search engines love fresh content, so the more often you update your website with a new blog, a feature article, a press release, or a bio about an employee or client, the higher your site will be indexed by the search engines.
4) Key Ingredients on Every Effective Website. In addition to writing and posting fresh new material on your website, the site should also include some information about your products and services and how those products and services can meet the needs of customers. These brick and mortar components of your site include: your "home" page, the "about us" page, a "FAQ" page, and a "products and services" page. While your new blogs or original articles may be the "landing pages" where new visitors and potential clients first "land" on your site when clicking on a link from somewhere else on the Internet, your foundation pages will be the first pages of copy a new visitor explores before considering hiring your services.
It doesn't matter how technologically savvy your site appears to be to the reader; it doesn't matter how many buttons or links or graphics or videos or other distracting gizmos may be on it. What matters most is the content--the wording. Compare it to someone who is all dressed up and looks as if she just walked out of a fashion zine, but when she opens her mouth to speak, you soon discover there is not much going on between the ears. She's gorgeous on the outside, but empty on the inside. So it is with an effective website. While the frame and visual components might by pretty or different from the norm, the words on the website must reflect a business that is creative, professional, a leading expert in the particular field, and client-oriented.
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