While your website content goes first on YOUR site, it has a second life online with places like Wikipedia, which can link back to your site. Here, an entry in Wikipedia on the Pan American WorldPort; it includes facts gathered from company websites, yet exists on its own, away from the company, which is defunct.

It is surprising that it takes so long for people to learn that content helps build website readership.

To get traffic to a website,  you can only do three things. You can either run ads, create inbound links or build content. While there is nothing wrong with the first two, building content is the best long term solution. It’s not like chicken and the egg. You have to have an egg to have  a chicken. But in the web, even if you JUST put up content and do little else, eventually Google, Bing and the rest will find your site, if the content is good enough.

That doesn’t mean you don’t want to think of other ways to build traffic like inbound links, but it does mean that you need to think of content first for your website.

Before you think of a website’s design, you want to think of the content. What readers do you want to reach? What is it you want to tell the reader? And how to you want to tell it to them? Once you answer those questions, you can begin thinking about your website redesign and how it will build website traffic.

When you think of what you want to tell readers, you need to build a plan for the content of your website. Here are some thoughts.

1. You are the publisher. Now, the company is the publisher, not the newspaper or the TV station or radio station. Pretend that you, as a company, own a newspaper. You, then as management, will be supervising the whole effort but you need someone content minded to help decide the words that are on the pages that you put out. So find someone who can come up with a list of ideas of what to promote on the website, and how to distribute that content weekly so the website stays fresh.
2. Watch for bells and whistles: There are many people who present a fancy face to a website, but they have made no allowances for keeping up the content of the website. Putting up a website is CHEAP. Hosting costs $10 a month for all except the busiest sites, and much of the software used to build a site is already on hand. So what you are spending is staff time. When someone proposes a website and you ask how this will be maintained, if they don’t have an answer, offer them the door.
3. Budget for the exact hours a week it will take to keep the site fresh for a year. I worked with one very astute agency with an aggressive social media plan and plan for a new website. However, there was no budget to produce the content that they wanted to Twitter. So it was all a big waste. You need to feed the beast! Twittering your website won’t work if your website has the same stale content. And you don’t want to spend lots of time just Twittering other websites just to build your Twitter feed. You want to build YOUR brand and traffic.
4. The website isn’t important. When you are thinking about a content plan for a website, you aren’t just thinking about your website. You are thinking about the content you want out there in the universe, no matter the forum, including web syndication. While you need to start with your own website, you need to realize that it doesn’t matter in the end where the information appears. What matters is that the information is out there. This is particularly important in tourism websites. Does it matter whether someone learns about the hotel on your website, or on some other website or social media site like Facebook? Of course it doesn’t matter. Think of the end goal, not the method.
5. Hire a journalist or a person who knows how to quickly come up with content to do the content. Certainly, a journalist isn’t the only person who can write copy, but they are almost always able to do it quickly and without fuss.
6. Don’t fuss over words. In the old era of print, companies obsessed over words. That makes sense when you are spending thousands of dollars on collateral, annual reports and the like. But on the web, the key to building content is putting lots of words out there, and using them to hook readers. While you don’t want bad grammar on a website, you can’t worry too much, because every day that you dither and piss, you miss talking to potential customers and readers. Get it out there and then fix it.
7. Enlist PR. Your company press releases are a part of website content, and you need lots of them to fill a website. But you need more than that, and you should enlist your PR staff as “staff writers” for your website. That will flatter them, and help you out.
8. Be mindful of personality. Your company website needs PEOPLE to work. Readers want to see the people who make up a company, so when you are talking about a company’s website content, you need to show the potential customer the people who make up the company. If you are a retailer, you need to show the staff. If you are a repair company, you need to play up the expertise of the repair guys. Whatever your niche, your employees from top down should be the “Stars” of your website.
9. Do not make it top down. Some companies only put their CEOs on the website. This is analogous to companies where the CEO parks right next to the front door, and makes the customers park far away. You don’t want to show that sort of company to your readers.
10. Be careful of barriers. There are many people whose turfs will be invaded with websites. On a redesign, you will begin to think it is 1985. IT folks think the own it because they know code. PR people think they own it because they are used to feeding the press with releases. Sales thinks they own it because they put out marketing materials. Executives think they own it because they are king and the website is the part of the company that most see first. The reality is that ALL departments have a voice in the website, but they each need to know that they have different areas. It’s like a factory floor. The PR people need to keep doing releases, as you need them for content. The IT people need to know how to keep it secure. The executives need to make sure it reflects the aspirations of the company. The branding people need to be sure it reflects the image.
11. Use WordPress. I cannot stress this enough. WordPress is so flexible and SEO-friendly that you can miss out if you aren’t using it at least for some part of your site or a micro-site. Certainly, there can be other blog software programs and CMS programs, but WordPress is used by some top news sites and companies, and it improves every month. Of course, if you are a catalog retailer or airline, your main website is about what you are selling. But why not do a separate micro-site to explain products, and link it back and forth?
12. Don’t keep it short. People will tell you that web readers want things fast, and need quick reads. That’s all true, but it doesn’t mean that long things don’t work on the web. An example is a 2,00o word company history. How else do you tell the story? Instead, what you need to do is vary the length of items on the website.
13. Map out who you need to talk to. Your content plan is about making contact with people, either suppliers, friends, future customers or everyday readers. So think about who those people are when you build the content of the site.
14. Keep it fresh for the bots. You need to stay on top of the stories published, and make sure they are updated. So even the most modest plan will fail if you do not keep updating the content. Google and other search engines come back to your website with “bots” when the website is updated with fresh content. The more updates, the more the Google-bots come.
15. What do readers want? Think about his. If you are a retailer, what information do your customers need to know about the products? For restaurant websites, talk about the food, chefs and recipes. For retailers, talk about what you sell and how to maintain it. For service companies, talk about HOW you do your work. There is content unique to you and your employees, and you need to share it with the public to tell them your story.

While the economy is in transition, the changes in technology and media are making it easier and easier for companies to talk DIRECTLY to their customers without a media filter.

Questions? Call Content Editor Garland Pollard at (703) 745-8602. Or email him for a time to talk.