Gone are the olden days where you can create a website and not touch it for 7 years. Your website is not just a sales or marketing brochure, it should be a living, breathing organism. Your customers want need you to give them relevant content. They are searching for it and will pay the company that can help them solve the problem. they are searching for. If you don’t regularly add content to your website you will be left behind, and it might be sooner than you think.
I’m guessing that your industry doesn’t have someone creating valuable and educational content. They all talk about their own company and how great they are. Does that build trust? Does that make you want to work with them? The same thing applies to you, your industry and your website. The companies that creates quality content in various formats will easily become the industry leader, and the search engines and social media will generously reward them. Is that you? Will you get left behind, or will you be an industry leader?
Search and Social Rule the World
We all know that Google reigns online. If you want to capture the attention of your customers, then you need to put relevant content on your website that people and the search engines will like. Similarly, if your content is sharable and people find value in it enough to share it with their friends and co-workers you will find success. But, if you can master both of these, you will rule the world (in a good way of course).
What does this new website look like?
You should think of your website as a place to teach and educate your customers and clients. Don’t focus on talking only about your company, but create content about your industry that people will find helpful. Try to talk about your company 20% of the time (or less) and create content that is about your industry along with helpful content 80% of the time.
It’s time to stop thinking of your website as only sales copy and marketing. It’s time to stop thinking of only putting blogs and articles on your website. It’s time to think of your website as a Learning Center. People should be able to find valuable content about your industry that will help them build trust with you. And once they trust you, they will be more than happy to purchase from you. Since everyone learns differently, you should have many kinds of content on your website. A Learning Center will build credibility and authority and your customers are looking for someone that’s a subject matter authority.
Here are some things that your website should have on it:
- articles
- video tutorials
- eLearning modules
- white papers
- case studies
- ebooks
- courses
- podcasts
- Q&A
- newsletters
- blogs
A Learning Center will help your customers and save you time
By having quality content that’s relevant to your customer base, you will build up a library of helpful content that you can share with customers when they have questions. We do this ourselves. When we notice our clients continually having the same questions, we create training videos, tutorials and helpful articles. This not only be tremendously helpful to your customers, it also saves you time in having to explain the same process and procedures multiple times.
Having relevant and educational content will help your SEO
Since you are creating valuable content that people love to consume share and search engines index, this will greatly help your search engine rankings. Similarly, the less content you create, the less you will be indexed and you will drop in the search rankings.
Get a plan and act
You might be thinking that you don’t have time to create all this content, but I would argue that if your website doesn’t have helpful and educational content then your business will greatly suffer in the world dominated by search a social. The solution is to get a plan together and act.
- Get a schedule of when you will create the content. If you are like us, you eat, sleep and breathe news about your industry.
- Create content based on what you consume and share it with others. Carve out 3 days a week and spend 20 minutes to work on this content. It’s easier than you think. /li]
Do you need to hire someone to create engaging videos, create a flexible website to house your Learning Center, develop eLearning or training material? Let True Focus Media help you take your website and Learning Center to the next level.
