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Over the years a business person gains knowledge through study and experience. As any impressionable newbie in your business will tell you, that knowledge is awesome and valuable. Avoiding pitfalls saves time. Knowing your marketplace makes you more money.
And helping customers is the ticket to sales.
One of the keys to successful content strategy is the willingness to share that information. This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how the ownership of valuable information makes it difficult for some business owners to part with it. Many don’t like to share what they know to anyone but their co-owners, sales people, and employees.
Thing is, if you don’t share what you know online, people won’t easily find your website and they certainly won’t stay on it. People use the internet to search for answers to problems. If you keep the answers to yourself, the words your prospects are using to get help from your products and services won’t end up in the content elements on your site.
That’s because the text on your website will tend toward empty superlatives about your business. You say that you offer good service. You are a leader in your field. You offer competitive pricing. You have many satisfied customers.
A Helpful Content Strategy
Do you see the problem here? No one searches these terms for answers to their problems. Then, if they stumble across your website, say if they’re local and they’ve heard of you, superlatives don’t get them engaged.
Sharing your knowledge with blog posts divided up into categories provides easy answers. Your sales pages packed with the benefits of each of your products or services delivers satisfaction to your visitors. Your homepage organized into clearly marked categories directs people to exactly the right place.
It is better to approach your internet marketing from the perspective of a coach or teacher, not a proprietary owner of knowledge and wisdom that you are determined to keep close to the vest. You might think you’re giving away valuable, hard won information to your competition. And I suppose you are. The trouble is, this is the information age. Believe it or not, most of what you know is already out there.
The trick is to be sure it’s you who delivers it to your marketplace, not your competition. You become the authority that people turn to, not the guy or gal down the street. Use your knowledge in the keywords you use on your web pages. Teach people who want to learn about your service with your blog and in your sales pages.
You can talk about yourself in the About Us section. That’s the right place for you to introduce yourself to your visitors. Tell them about you, your business philosophy, and the superlatives that give people confidence in you.
But be generous in your approach to online marketing. Teachers and coaches spend their days making their charges better people…you do the same with your content strategy and you’ll see big gains in your profits online.
Until next time,
Nick
Nick Burns is an SEO web writer specializing in persuasive copywriting and content marketing. He provides clients a winning content strategy plus the special web writing to make it work. You can contact Nick here.
