Can you or your staff write killer website content? (and if so... do you really have the time?)

Writing for the Web is not the same as writing newsletter articles or brochures. That’s because of the way your site visitors “read” ...which is really more like scanning and skimming, with true reading reserved for only those nuggets of great interest discovered in the skimming stage. And that’s assuming they stay interested long enough to find any such nuggets. Further, your copy needs to facilitate the search engines’ finding your site ...something that’s just not an issue with any of the off-line vehicles.

All this means that your website’s content needs to be...

Engaging – If your visitors aren’t captivated, and so leave before getting to the good parts, it won’t matter how good the good parts are. You may need to raise the “punchiness” quotient higher than you would generally use in other formats.

Concise – The verbose, flowery style of many brochures is guaranteed to send most web visitors packing. Remember, they’re skimming; they want “just the facts, ma’am”, without the hyperbole and back-patting.

“Drill-down” organized – Web visitors will become impatient with either story-type narrative or tedious exposition. What they really want is to be able to control the level of detail: when they find a topic of real interest, they’ll be glad to dive down and read more. To support this, try organizing your content much like a slide presentation – using main and backup “slides” (separate web pages) – with the “speaker notes” included as text explaining the bullet-points.

Keyword-rich – Just by developing meaty content, you’ll go a long way toward making your site attractive to the search engines. To finish the job, you need to ensure that your content incorporates the keywords/phrases that you know (vs. surmise) your market uses when looking for your type of product/service.

Rocket science? ...no. Time-consuming? ...definitely.

Clearly, there’s nothing in the above recipe that your people couldn’t do, given enough time and practice. But can they do it quickly and efficiently? Probably not; in fact, eMagine has found that client content development becomes the gating item in nearly every website project. Perhaps even more important... while your people are busily restructuring content for the website, they can’t be developing webinars, direct mailings, or other activities that produce leads today.

That’s why eMagine offers a content development service. Our professional writers can take your brochures, MRDs or other raw material and turn it into compelling website content that respects the guidelines outlined above. It’s not only the easy way... it generally also leads to better results. We’ve done this for scores of other clients, and will be happy to provide an estimate for your site.

Need content for a “nurturing” email series, too? Not surprisingly, there are special guidelines for that; see our like-titled page under “e-mail Marketing”.  Or, if your people just don’t have time, we can do that for you too.