Traffic Building

The biggest question in the blogging world is “What do I write about?”

If you’re a business trying to generate leads or sales online, your offline customers are your best source of content.

Think about what questions you get asked on a daily basis by potential customers - even things like “Where are you located?”. If someone has taken the time to call your business to ask a question, you can bet there are a few more like them typing the same question into Google or Yahoo! search.

The questions might take on a different form online like “dallas dry cleaner” instead of “how do I get to your store?” but the intent is the same. If you do a series of blog posts that answer frequently asked questions like these, you’ll naturally be creating unique and useful content that your potential customers are likely to search for.

In addition to questions asked by prospects, answer questions asked by current customers at all phases of your sales cycle. We’re increasingly turning to the internet to do extensive research on products or services before we even contact a potential vendor and you want your blog posts to match the industry phrases and common queries those doing research might use.

Content really can be this easy - just pick a question, use it as the title of a post, and answer it in your blog.

Akami recently released a study that found “Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.”

Although you may not be running a retail site, understanding what your users expect and how they’re likely to evaluate your web site when they visit is critical to keeping them around long enough to see your marketing message.

Think about how you evaluate web pages and how long you’ll search a page looking for the information promised by the search result that brought you there. Chances are you put pages on a pretty short leash. After all, there are tens of thousands of other pages in that search results page just a back button click away.

If the site you’re looking at doesn’t deliver quickly, you simply don’t have enough time to give it a second chance - you just head back to the search results and try the next site in line.

What if you could put your most important content in a spot where most people look first when visiting your web page? That way you could get your message across quickly and hopefully grab the visitor’s interest long enough to keep them on your site to explore the rest of your content.

At www.useit.com, Jakob Nielsen conducted an eye-tracking study and generated several ‘heat maps’ that show the dominant reading patterns of visitors on three different types of websites.

I’ll leave the in-depth study of the results to their website, but one interesting similarity between all three heat maps generated from the study is that a visitor will almost invariably look at the portion of your page to the right of the left navigation column and below the header.

Wouldn’t it make sense to put your most arresting content or message in that spot?

Another interesting tendency is for users to look for visual cues while scanning the page. Looking at the heat maps, you can see that visitor’s eyes fixated on the top left of the content area, on the content at the top right of the page, then jumped to the tops of paragraphs and lists as they scanned down the page.

When writing for the web, it’s important to keep this tendency to scan in mind. Break up your content into several paragraphs and highlight important content by placing it in a list or segregating it from the normal flow of your page. It may be more natural to write a few longer paragraphs instead of many short ones, but you’ll get more of your content absorbed by breaking it up and making it more easily digestible.

Also remember that the typical visitor is only able to read text on a computer screen at around 80% of their normal reading rate for printed text. Considering the extra effort needed to read your content, making it as easily scanned as possible will go a long way toward keeping those visitors around once they find your site.

You’ve likely heard the addage “Content is King” - meaning the best way to get traffic to your website is to fill it with quality content. Before optimizing your page structure for search engines, before trying to build links, and before pay-per-click ad campaigns - if you don’t have quality content on your site that people are willing to read, bookmark, talk about, and link to, those other forms of marketing won’t be nearly as effective.

I’ll leave discussions about the what, when, why, and how of quality content for other blog posts, I just wanted to share a post I read recently in a forum that nicely encapsulates the end goal of providing quality content.

I’m a professional writer and run an informational website so when i started up 2 years ago i assumed i must be onto a goldmine as everyone kept talking about how content is king.

So there i was, waiting for all those natural, organic lnks to come rolling in. I was waiting for a long time.

Recently I had an epiphany on the matter. It’s not good content alone that draws links, it’a authority content. If you have one really funny article about buying widgets in Peru then yes, it may be a good read but who’s going to link to it?

If on the other hand you get a criticall mass of content together about widgets in peru, their history, their production, the culture of the users, the types of widget available - in short, more information about widgets in peru than a reader could digest in one visit - then people will consider your pages to be a resource and will bookmark and link to you.

Content needs to be well written but that isn’t enough. It needs to belong to a larget section of content that has authority status in the eyes of the user. Take every angle of your subect and write separate articles and guides about it. You might think you’re repeating yourself at times but to someone researchign the topic, all good info available is manna.