Web Content for Real People
When you build a website, you are trying to attract a specific audience that is interested in your topic. The content must be useful, helpful, and updated enough to keep them coming back.
Notice I didn’t say anything in there about making people buy things? Why? Because if you have a great website that attracts the right audience, they will naturally be interested in your product or click your contextual ads.
If you build a website around buy buy buy – unless you are Amazon or Best Buy – you are just going to look like another little website trying to sell them something. But also, if you aren’t building a quality website and you want to compete with bigger players, you will be lost somewhere in the 1,837,882 results returned in Google for your keywords. Being 139 is no good. Not many people slog through 14 pages of results to find you. Frankly, I’d say no one does. In fact, studies show that most people don’t go beyond the first page (which I think is nuts, I’m a big researcher and I often go to page 4 or 5 or further if I really want to dig into a topic).
I am often asked advice by friends who want to know how they can get people to click on their ads on their site more or buy the products they are offering. These are niche sites on a very narrow topic usually. I say, stop focusing on the ads, and focus on making the site the go-to place for the problem/niche/topic your products purportedly fix. If you get a big enough audience, you will sell what you’re selling.
Let’s say you have decided you want to sell fish oil – this is a totally random scenario only to illustrate the process of attracting potential customers.
You know that Jack’s Northern Atlantic Fish Oil is the best fish oil on earth. It lowered your cholesterol and your skin and hair look great. You also know Jack’s willing to give you $10 for every jar of fish oil you sell. Hmmm, I can make money selling something I totally believe in!
So you build a website that goes on and on about how Jack’s fish oil’s the best and you have to get it now – oh you will feel so good, buy this fish oil! Buy it! Buy the fish oil!
You get one sale, two sales…then three. Oh you are so excited. Your website is just AWEsome. But then it stays at a trickle. You get a random sale here or there. You start looking at your analytics. You find you do really well on “Jack’s fish oil cholesterol” – ok, that’s a pretty specific phrase, what I call a “buyer’s phrase”, but how many people do you think search that phrase? Not many based on your sales.
Now you have a dilemma – you can’t write dozens of articles on Jack’s fish oil. It would be ludicrous.
However, you have started to live a healthy lifestyle. You went to the doc and found out you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, maybe even borderline sugar numbers. So you went on a health kick. You have lost 25 pounds, your cholesterol is almost normal without prescription meds, your blood sugar is awesome, and your blood pressure is well-controlled.
Why not create a blog-like site just about living healthy? You could talk about your journey – the feelings you went through when the doctor said, “Heart attack waiting to happen.” You could share your healthy snack ideas, talk about getting over your aversion to exercise. You could probably post something daily about the challenges and choices you make.
Now you are creating something that might interest people to come to YOUR site rather than just go to the Official JackFishOil site.
There’s a bit more to it than this – focusing certain pages on certain keywords, using tags to categorize your content, various plugins that will allow articles to be indexed within minutes of publishing. But this is about the big picture: build a site that interests people, throw your products in the sidebars and pepper them about the site. You will get more visitors with more useful interesting content, and some of those people will most definitely click your ads.
