Some tips on creating and measuring successful web content
27th January 2010 by Sarah Howard
Creating successful web content requires taking into account a selection of variables and most importantly from a business perspective, realising how to measure the success of ‘good’ content.
When setting out on a content writing task, it is vital to define the project’s goal. Will the content seek to persuade people to take an immediate action or is the goal more long term, seeking to create links, improve search engine rankings or brand awareness. For the former, specific, influential and convincing language will need to be utilised; whilst for the latter a more broad approach can be performed.
Perhaps the most important factor to keep in mind when writing good content is one’s audience. Research your audience and make sure that your article is catchy and stands out from the plethora of content available. It is prudent to create a current article, related to up-to-the-minute developments, not just re-writing what has already been produced by a multitude of other writers. Whilst your article doesn’t have to be perfect, it is important to use the right language and tone for your audience. For example, a serious or highly corporate article shouldn’t be covered in a flippant manner.
This leads onto the next tip of creating quality over quantity. Yes, it is important to generate as many current articles as possible to increase search rankings and brand awareness, but it is also more critical to write good quality, remarkable content that readers can contemplate, share and comment on. Generating a fine balance between the quality vs. quantity debate will prove helpful as whilst it is paramount to publish fresh and engaging content, it is also valuable to generate consistent articles in a timely manner.
Bring your personality into the article. Who wants to read a bland piece of content filled with polysyllabic heterogeneous lexis (exactly) that anyone without a degree in intricate business process systems will not understand? Even in more corporate style articles, a degree of personality to engage and entertain the audience (and certainly to stop them clicking away from the page) is vital. Another feature to lure the reader in is a punchy headline. Don’t be afraid to experiment with a bold headline that will entice visitors to your site.
Making the content easy to share and forge connections is perhaps the ultimate goal of successful web content marketing. Building connections with your visitors can help to create inbound links as well as increase content visabilty. Add elements to make it easy to pass your content along, for example, a share or retweet style button to further increase connections. Sharing content with visitors is useful as seeing how they respond is a good tool to making sure that your work is as refined as possible.
Now you have followed all these steps and created a memorable, good quality article, how do you measure the success of such content? After all you need to make sure that you’re tracking your outcomes successfully. Depending on your content type, a good start is to define the main performance indicators to monitor. The main content marketing indicators include the following:
Bookmarks, comments, downloads, subscriptions, fans, favourites, feedback, followers, posts, ratings, reviews, testimonials, time spent on site, views and print page.
By looking at a select group of these key indicators, it is possible to see how well your content is going down, what results are being generated and ultimately how successful your content marketing campaign is.
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