Here are five simple tips to ensure you keep your website focused on your audience.
It may be simple common sense, but many website owners forget to establish what their site is trying to say or what they want to achieve before they start to build their website and to write their content.
Tip #1 – Outline Your Goals
Building an outline for your site is essential.
Outlines are useful tools when it comes to website design. An outline presents a picture of the main ideas and the subsidiary ideas of the site subject. Your outline will show a basic overview and highlight important details, providing structure for content presentation and a basic roadmap to keep you on track. At the very least you should provide answers to the following questions before you begin creating your website content:
- Who is my website for? Can I define my ideal audience?
- What do I want to teach or provide my visitors?
- How will I get my information across?
- What is my ‘Most Wanted Response’?
Tip #2 – Give and Take
Website readers are usually looking for good informative content, so ensure you provide the give in your site content body and leave your take (Your Most Wanted Response) until after you have provided something valuable to the reader. Content quality should make your reader feel good, and leave the reader with a good impression. It shouldn’t really leave them needing more information and result in them searching other sources. Try to resist the temptation to sell within your content. Pre-Sell by all means but leave the selling to your sales pages. Your ‘Most Wanted Response’ in a content page should be to encourage your reader to value your content and to only pre-sell any products or services you provide or promote.
Tip #3 – Format & Structure
Remember you may be an expert in your subject or niche, but your readers are not. Don’t write too smart and keep your reading level at a normal grade to appeal to more readers. Think of questions your potential readers might ask and answer them in as simple a way as is reasonable for your subject matter. Try to maintain a consistent format in your writing structure. Use templates to maintain your structure and ensure your information can be easily found and easily digested.
Tip #4 – Share Your Real Life Experiences
If you have a lot of knowledge of your subject don’t simply lay it out there. Divide it up by including your own experiences of how you came by your knowledge or how you use the information. You may be excited to share all you know but you will overwhelm your readers if your content is too detailed and too long. Break up large topics into smaller sections over more pages by focusing on the component parts of the content. This will help you to view the subject from your readers perspective and will give you more content for your site and the opportunity to include more images, etc. without scaring your readers off with extremely long pages.
Tip #5 – Know Your Readers
Always ensure you can monitor and track your visitor traffic. If you don’t know your audience or where your audience originates then you’ll never be able to tailor your content to suit that audience. Use Google Analytics, Statcounter, AWStats or whichever tracking utility you prefer but make sure you use those facilities to analyse how your visitors use your website and what content is most popular.
Knowing what is popular and what is not, means you can focus your content building efforts on expanding subjects visitors want to read about and ignore others that are of little interest.
In addition every visitor will come to your site from somewhere, and every visitor leaves sooner or later. Analysing that traffic will show you which subjects could increase your income potential and possibly decrease expenses. Knowing your visitor demographics will help you write content that will appeal more to that demographic.
And the key to effective traffic analysis is simplicity and concentrating only on what you need to know, which is information on your most popular content, your effective entry pages and badly performing exit pages. That is; what your visitors spend time reading, the pages that draw them to your website and the pages that make them leave.
Add the above to which sites or search engines your visitors come from and the keywords and phrases they use to find your website and you’ll build a good picture of exactly who your audience are.
These five simple tips to help maintain your website focus should help and encourage you to use your knowledge and experience in your website content.
By doing so you will encourage readers and build a website that is full of unique content that provides interested visitors with a really valuable experience.
By keeping your readers needs as the focus of your content creation you will encourage your website visitors to come back again and again and to consider you as the authority on your subject, that you obviously are.