Content is King
An old internet saying goes, “Content is king.” Content gives visitors a reason to spend time on your website, to look at your what you have to offer, and, eventually, to convert. Content also gives search engine spiders something to look at and index, giving you more qualified traffic. Content can easily make or break a website.
Of course, not just any content will do. For a website to be successful, content has to be fresh. Ideally, your website should have new or updated content on a daily or weekly basis. This gives your visitors a reason to keep coming back, which may produce further conversions. RSS and Atom feeds can be an excellent way to promote your website’s new content, allowing visitors to subscribe with the news aggregator of their choice and receive updates as you make them.
New content won’t mean anything, however, if it isn’t useful. Write content that appeals to your target audience. Give your visitors something interesting or entertaining. It can help to showcase your products and services, but over-advertising can turn away a potential conversion just as quickly as it can create one. If it’s something that you would read on your free time, it will be valuable to your visitors as well.
On that same note, don’t drown your visitors with too much content. Most visitors will only read a short thought-bite that is a few paragraphs long at most. A particularly avid reader may be willing to stay and read several such articles, but don’t count on such users comprising the majority of your audience. Keep your content concise while maintaining a high level of quality.
Content management, of course, isn’t always easy. I recommend WordPress. It’s free, easy to install and use, open source, highly extensible, and generally everything you could want in a content management or blogging utility. Software such as this allows you to automate the minutia of HTML and file management so you can focus on what’s more important, your content.