Web Content

Why a shared vision works better than a style guide.

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A shared company visionWork with any company of a reasonable size and you’ll likely be presented with a style guide.

Style guides for writers can be quite long. They give you instructions on the length of headlines, the use of images and other visual content, the number of words you need to write, the phrases you must use and mustn’t use, the tone of voice you should aim to achieve, and so on.

Honestly, they are a nightmare. A pain in the rear for any self-respecting writer or copywriter.

So why do companies create these ghastly guides? Well, they are aiming for consistency in the writing on their websites. They want everything to look much the same and to be written with more or less the same tone of voice.

Plus there is often some nonsense put in there by their lawyers.

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When social media over-promises.

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Poor quality web content and social media.This morning I saw a post on Google+ from a web marketing company I follow.

The post had a headline and about five lines of text. It promised me information that could dramatically improve my web marketing efforts. It was well written and compelling.

So I clicked the link and was taken to the article on the website.

The article was a crashing disappointment. Just basic information that pretty much any online copywriter already knows.

It’s not that the article was bad. It might be useful for someone who had just begun studying the craft of online writing. But that’s not what was sold in the Google+ post.

This is happening more and more. Social media updates over-promise, and the website content they link to under-delivers.

I have stopped following a number of companies for this reason. It’s really annoying to be tricked into clicking through to an article or post that proves to offer far less than I was led to expect.

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Social media isn’t just a hook for your website.

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Social media hookHere we are, several years into the rise of social media, and companies still have no clue about what the social web is about.

When I scan through a company’s Facebook page, for example, what I see for the most part are links to its website.

Someone at the company wants to drive traffic to a particular page. So they send out a tweet, or create a Facebook update, or a Google+ post. The social media content is often automatically created, drawing the title and a photo from the site’s web page.

In other words, the social media update is simply a link back to the site, with no intrinsic value of its own.

That’s not social media content. That’s just a hook.

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Being “on-message” is the worst thing you can do.

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rob ford on messageIf you want to engage your readers, earn their trust and turn them into customers, the worst thing you can do is write content and sales copy that is “on-message”.

Online content and copy that is on-message has about as much power as a politician who has been overly trained by his or her media trainers and speech writers.

The outcome lacks all authenticity. It’s BS, and we know it.

I recently returned from a trip to the UK where the country had just voted to choose their representatives for the European parliament.

What usually happens is a win by the Conservatives or the Labour Party, with the Lib Dems taking third place.

This time, the winner was a new, upstart party called Ukip.

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Why I’m opting out of the content race.

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Leaving the raceI don’t like doing things just because I’m told to do them. Or when I’m told I have to do them.

And recently I’m feeling a little pressured to keep adding new posts to this site on an increasingly frequent basis.

Where is this pressure coming from?

It’s coming from the web itself.

Both the search engines and social media favor content that is new and fresh. (How often do you check last week’s tweets or last month’s Facebook updates?)

Also, readers seem to favor content that is fresh and new. There is an assumption that posts and articles that are new are somehow better and more valuable than content that was published last week, a month ago or even a year ago.

More and more the web is about what’s happening right now.

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If you have a WordPress website, get yourself the new bizXpress plugin.

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bizXpress keyword research toolWordPress has become the world’s most popular website-building platform. The site you’re on right now is a WordPress site.

Along with so many other people, I like WordPress for a number of reasons. You have total flexibility over the design of your site. It’s the most social of all platforms. And it makes it incredibly easy to add new content and edit existing content.

In short, I love it.

But not all my sites are built with WordPress. My money-making website, CoffeeDetective.com, is built with and hosted on the SiteBuildIt platform.

Why? Because the platform was created specifically to optimize the performance of content-rich, topic-specific sites like my coffee site. In fact my coffee site attracts over TEN times the traffic of the site you’re on now. And believe me, the coffee topic is fiercely competitive.

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