Content & eMarketing
Marketing with Content
You've probably heard the declaration: "content is king!" Well, it is. That's nothing new. Quality content has always been important to any type of publication, online or off. It is also important to any kind of marketing. Without a website's content there would be nothing to market. And in the hands of a skilled eMarketer, content also becomes a tool for driving traffic to a site, building your brand, converting the casual visitor into a paying loyal customer, and even directly generating revenue.
Good Content = Search Engine Traffic
Search engines remain the primary way visitors discover websites. The secret of using your content for online marketing begins with the non-human visitors from the search engines you must first win over - robots and spiders.
Robots are automated programs, and spiders are a type of robot that crawl the web - jumping from link to link in order to index the web's content in databases. Search engines like Alta Vista and Lycos use these spiders to build web indexes. Your site will be ranked in huge databases during searches depending upon quantitative measurements of certain keywords amongst the content of your site. For robots, content equals text - and this means all the text that can be seen as well as the hidden programming.
To help these spiders quantify your site you should be looking at several design components: metatags, comment tags, title tag, alt tags and even complex doorway pages if necessary. Factors like keyword weight and the visible text are also important. Used wisely, effectively and legally (in other words no Spam), this kind of content can be a great help with your site's ranking.
Good Content = Happy Visitors
For humans, content is much more than text alone. If you can build a site with free and useful information that is enjoyable to read, you've already done what it takes to have a successful site. Word will spread and you'll be driving a lot of traffic to your site without a lot of work. This content involves anything that adds value to your website, including text, artwork, rich media, contests, surveys, products - everything you have to offer. The best content is:
· relevant to your target audience,
· well-written, right down to the privacy policy and site map,
· easy to navigate, don't frustrate your visitors by making the information they want hard to find (this includes overall site navigation as well as how information is laid out on the page),
· interactive, engage your audience and involve them with your site with contests, games, and other interactive content, but don't overdo it,
· personalized, the best content speaks one-to-one - tailor your site to each individual's interests using user profiles and tracking,
· and current, so that repeat visitors are rewarded with new information each time they come back. This will help build a loyal community and foster the trust necessary to close that sale.
Good Content = Money
Good content generates revenue not only by building a loyal base of repeat visitors, but also provides options for revenue directly related to content on your site.
Content as Advertising
Having quality content on your site can attract advertising dollars. Innovative advertisers are looking beyond the banner ad and are investigating alternatives that will engage customers. Sponsorships and advertorials are two examples of content as advertising.
Sponsorships are usually content and design partnerships, wherein a website article or area is supported by a sponsor whose product or service is related. At ClickZ (www.clickz.com), for example, DoubleClick sponsors the section on eMail marketing.
Sponsorships can also work in reverse, as most sites are hungry for quality content. You might be able to provide an article, game or other interactive content that adds value to their site, but also builds your brand and links back to your site - for free.
Advertorials are ads that maintain the look and feel of the other editorial copy on the your site, making the ad copy seem more like an organic part of the overall editorial copy. For instance, we've all seen special advertorial sections within online versions of magazines like Time or Newsweek themed "Technology in Education," or something similar-copy that had been shaped, if not created, by companies like Intel or IBM.
Content for Sale
Content is becoming an online product in and of itself. The more valuable the information, the more users will be willing to pay a fee for access to it. If you spend time developing a reputation for providing dependable, accurate, high-quality information, you may be able to generate revenue by selling your content through subscriptions and user fees for access to articles, reports, statistics, etc (Consumer Reports www.consumerreports.org does this quite successfully). Content can also be sold from site to site through licensing, much like broadcast licensing for television and radio.
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Did you know?
Despite consumers' reluctance to pay for online content now, more than 4 in 10 acknowledge that content can't remain free forever. This increasing receptiveness-along with the need of companies to find new revenue streams for supplementing advertising-will help the paid content market grow to $5.7 billion by 2005. Broadband acceptance will be a critical driver in 2003, when consumers will evolve from paying merely to be enriched to paying to be entertained.
(Source: Jupiter Communications)
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Sites of the Month
Contentious
Webzine for writers, editors, and others who create content for online media - websites, email publications, intranets, etc.
EContent Magazine
The online component of EContent Magazine which looks at strategies and resources for the digital content industry. Covers all aspects of content creation, acquisition, organization, and distribution.
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Tip of the Month
Would you try to design and launch a website without knowing anything about the technology or process? Probably not. So, why would you fill your site with amateur content? You may be able to purchase relevant content from wire services occasionally, but it's best to let your in-house experts do the work with a professional website editor, or hire professional writers to do the research and writing for your site. Content is king, and the king is not cheap. So pay up for quality content and reap the rewards in the end.
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