If your company’s website is your storefront, then your content is the signage on the doors and windows. It’s also an important channel for connecting with customers, building relationships and engagement. These days, most people will conduct their own online research about a product or service before reaching out to a company. You want your research to show up in their search results. The best way to do that is to make sure your website is fully functional and optimized with great content.
Managing your website content takes time and resources. Sometimes the people and energy it takes to maintain your website can be significant. It all depends on the size and complexity of your business. But it’s important to look at your website content as a capital investment, making sure it gets enough time and attention, so it can work for your business.
What Are Your Goals?
But before you start creating content, you have to be clear about what you want to achieve. What are your company goals? What are your specific objectives. The answers to these questions are your North Star. It doesn’t matter if your projections are exactly right. What matters is that your content objectives align with what’s best for your business.
Depending on the type of business you operate, it may be best to contract your content management services out. At Web Design by Knight we have a team of professional content writers, ready to go to work for you.
If you want to try creating content for your business, here are a few beginner’s tips to getting organized.
Commit to a Schedule
Great blogs with great content are typically the result of a great schedule. A schedule would mean an outline of what you want to write about and when it gets published. Typically this would be created on a spreadsheet and would include the following:
- Topic and key words
- Categories
- Business goals
A blog schedule is a tool. It should increase productivity by helping you to get more out of your writing time. The schedule is yours to edit around other business tasks. But when you identify these things before you begin writing, your blogs will have a stronger focus.
Plan Your Content Months in Advance
Planning your blog content at least six months ahead accomplishes a few things.
A plan, once created, will save you time. When you sit down to write, you won’t have to spend time coming up with a topic. Instead, you’ll be ready to write.
When you can see six month’s worth of topics at a time, you can then start planning whole campaigns, or other marketing efforts and social media to sync with your blog topics. You can also plan around holiday marketing, special events and sales funnels.
Managing your content with a cohesive, systematic approach will always be more successful than a week or month at a time, or having different formats and platforms operating independently.
Set Aside Time to Write and Protect It
Just as important as managing your content is protecting your writing time. It’s so easy to get pulled away to handle more urgent matters, or to put out fires. When tempted to leave your keyboard, remember the big picture. You aren’t just writing a blog, you are managing the message of your business. And that is one of the most important, if not “the” most important, responsibilities of a business owner. When you say “no” to distractions, you’re saying “yes” to managing your message.
Schedule Your Blogs Ahead in WordPress
When you’re writing from a blog schedule, the ultimate goal is to work ahead and schedule your blogs. You can always change or adjust for unexpected events, but working ahead will give you some freedom. Stacking blogs ahead of time also provides some security, should you be away for personal reasons of any kind.
If You Aren’t Measuring, You Aren’t Marketing
When creating content for your website, there has to be some sense of where you are going and why. Your objectives should be measurable:
- How much profit do you need to cover your monthly expenses?
- How many customers do you need per month to be profitable?
- How many new leads do you need to generate those customers?
- What is your overhead?
- What does the average customer spend?
Having answers to these questions will provide clarity when making decisions about content and marketing.
Timelines
Every goal must have a time frame. For example, how much will it cost to acquire 20 new customers in 30 days? In this instance, the 30 day measurement makes it a “plan.” Without a time measurement, there is no plan. Time is the most important and consistent unit of measurement when it comes to evaluating your objectives.
Data
Data will tell you what’s working and what’s not. You might want to evaluate click-through rates, cost per click, conversion rates, average enterprise value of a customer, and lifetime value of a customer. Identifying the different data points creates a solid analytics plan. This data is available through Google Analytics.
Tools
What tools will you use to measure the data? Tools include Google analytics, tracking codes, tracking pixels and lead generation forms. These are the tools you’ll need to capture and organize the data that will give you insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Insights
A solid analytics dashboard will give you insights into where to adjust your content plan. We recommend Google Analytics because of its wealth of data points, and it’s free.
Let Us Do the Work For You
When you see a well-written blog on the internet, what you don’t see is all the time spent planning, researching, writing, editing and analyzing that material. If writing isn’t your strong suit, or if your business demands you spend your time managing other tasks, you might consider letting Web Design by Knight manage your content for you. Our content writing team can provide professional content and images for your website. After discussing your business goals and objectives, we can submit a content plan for your approval, then get to work improving your online presence. Contact us to learn more.