How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the C-Bomb

Content: It’s a word that fills every busy business owner with worry. You know that you need to create fresh content for your website in order to increase traffic, but you dread even the idea of content because you know you don’t have the time to write and post it. Is it possible to get the desired results that content brings your website without having to mess with it? Let’s examine this deeper.

Content is Everything  

The short answer to this question is “No.” The Internet is basically set up to distribute content, and priority is given to content that’s new and relevant. Therefore, for any Internet marketing effort to be successful, you need to have content to offer people in one form or another. To illustrate how powerful content is, consider these statistics:

• 571 new websites are created every minute. 
• In the same amount of time, Facebook users share more than half a million pieces of content (and each share typically gets passed on to over 100 users). 
• In that same minute, 48 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube.
• Every two days our society creates as much information as we have since the dawn of mankind to 2003.
• In 2013, 90 percent of the content on the Internet was created.

Granted, most of this user-generated content is media, entertainment, and online communication, but it shows just how much information dominates the age we live in. With this huge deluge of data, search engines need to be extremely effective when it comes to indexing all of it. Google does this with many different factors, such as how content is shared and distributed, and how original and relevant the content is.

With over 200 factors going into how Google ranks and indexes content, it’s pretty easy for a user to search for a term or phrase and find exactly what it is they’re looking for. Unfortunately, this means that, in order for your business to rank, your content needs to be more valuable, current, and popular than your competitors. If your competition is publishing valuable content and playing by the rules established by search engines, and your website has little content that’s never updated, then it will be difficult for a potential customer to find your site.      

How to Stand Out

The lesson here behind all of these crazy content statistics is that, if you want your company’s website to be found, then you have to regularly publish fresh and relevant content. Given the nature of how the Internet works, there’s no other way around this. In light of how busy you are, this news might be sort of a letdown. Creating valuable content is easier than you may realize. Here are some tips to help you out.

• Blogging: Many people are intimidated about writing a blog because they don’t feel like their writing skills are up to snuff, but thanks to the informal nature of blogging and how easy it is to use tools like spell checker, writing a blog is as easy as sharing your thoughts about your industry. Remember, you’re not writing an English paper; a blog article can even be as short as one or two paragraphs.
• Outsource and delegate your content: How big is your staff? Each person working for your company can be tapped to write a simple blog article. You can even get family, friends, and business colleagues, to write content for your website and feature them as a “guest contributor.” If you get serious about content, then there are even professional services you can outsource to that specialize in writing content for your industry with search engine rules in mind--like the knowledgeable, friendly, and professional content writers at JoomConnect.
• Social media: These days, having an active website for your company isn’t enough. In order to get your content to stand out from your competitors, you need to share it on social media accounts connected to your website. One way that a search engine determines whether or not your content is valuable, is to analyze the number of shares and interactions the content gets over social media. These are called “social signals,” and if your content is flatlining on social media, then Google will index it as DOA. Adding social media to your to-do list may seem like a headache, but once you get the hang of it, it’s as easy as clicking “share.” Just like writing content, JoomConnect can manage your company’s social media account on your behalf if you prefer.  
• Add more media to enrich your website: Informative and entertaining articles aren’t the only content that people are searching for. Other forms of valuable content include videos, pictures, podcasts, and more. It may sound intimidating to produce content like this, but you can easily create and even post a whole variety content over your smartphone. Just be sure to add accurate descriptions and metadata to your pictures and videos so that search engines can properly index what you post. For tips on how to do this, just give our SEO experts a call.

As you can see, creating content isn’t something to be scared of. Writing a blog is easy, taking a picture with your smartphone and posting it to Facebook is simple to do, and recruiting people to contribute content to your website isn’t an outlandish request. Now that you’ve gotten over your fear of the C-Bomb, go out, make a bunch of it, and share it with the world!  

Need some help? That’s what JoomConnect is here for!