Knowing how to create content for a website is essential to reach your audience in 2020. Whether you’re an individual, a company, a cat from Houston, or an alien from Mars.
Fortunately it’s not all that difficult.
This article will give you content creation tips and tricks based on extensive research and years of experience, so that you can refine your understanding of how to create content for a website.
Let’s get started.
Why is it Essential to Create Quality Website Content?
The average consumer today has a ton of choice, whether it’s written content, audio or video.
Unless you have tons of money to spend on online, TV or radio ads, you need to know how to create content for a website to survive in today’s evolving digital landscape.
Whether your forte is writing, talking (podcasts) or on-camera skills (video/YouTube), being discovered by prospects is driven by quality content.
Millions of people publish billions of pieces of content daily on the internet.
The quality of your content helps differentiate your website, podcast or YouTube channel and helps you rank above your competitors.
Before we delve deeper into how to create content for website, it’s probably better to address the fundamentals:
How to get Ideas for Great Content
Online Research
Search engines like Google, Bing; online encyclopedias like Wikipedia, and video-sharing platforms like YouTube are your best friends when it comes to online research.
It also helps to read forums and Reddit threads, Quora questions around your niche to see what people are talking about.
Oftentimes you can find your next great topic on the most obscure of forum topics. So, keep an open mind please.
Read Books
Whether you’re reading fiction or non-fiction, or self-help books, it doesn’t matter. There is no substitute for knowledge.
If you’re a well-read expert in your niche, content ideas will come easier to you in comparison with your not-so-well-read competitors.
Brainstorm Ideas with Like-Minded People
It’s always a great idea to bounce ideas off of friends and colleagues within your industry.
If you can’t find people to brainstorm with, join internet forums or social media groups in your niche.
Interview Thought Leaders in your Niche
One of the simplest ways is to conduct interviews in your niche and then transcribe those interviews.
You get a proofread document with text you can choose to use in whichever way you want, and you no longer have to worry about how to create content for website.
To do this, you can reach out to experts in your field of work, and most of them will be happy to give you an interview for free. Some may want credit, a bit of free publicity or a link back to their website.
One big advantage of this strategy is that your content is already conversational due to the interview. A 30 minute interview or dictation can get you close to 5000 words! And you don’t have to do a lot of brainstorming to come up with the content.
Just make sure to have all the questions prepared beforehand. If you try to “wing it” without experience of “winging it”, it may come off sounding amateurish.
You may not be able to edit an interview audio, but you can always edit the transcript before publishing.
Once the interview is done, either transcribe it yourself. Or if it’s time consuming, find an interview transcription service to do it for you.
How to Get Started with Creating Content
Understand your Audience
In our experience, the biggest struggle for many people comes with explaining who a service or product is intended for.
To be able to explain how your website provides value, you should be able to explain the “why” and “how” to your clients.
Once you’ve identified your unique value proposition, make it clear on your website/blog/channel homepage or in the about section.
It should be front and center, and prominent.
Having said all of the above, there will be some people, still, who won’t understand what your website is about.
You can’t please everyone, but if you can find a way to make your content even easier to consume, try it.
Create Content for Every Type of Customer
Once you’ve identified and understood your audience, now it’s time to brainstorm what type of content they might be looking for.
There are several tools (free and paid) online that can help with this, like:
- Google Ads’ Keyword Planner (PAID)
- Keyword research with Ubersuggest (Freemium*)
- Ahrefs (Free trial for 7 days)
- SEMRush (Free trial for 7 days)
*If you don’t know what “freemium” means, this may help.
Using the tools above, you can look at keywords (search terms) related to your niche that people are searching for.
Those will give you details like number of searches per month etc.
Services like Ahrefs and SEMrush also give you information on your competitors and search terms that they rank for.
Once you’ve found a couple of search terms for your website’s niche and identified your audience, now it’s time to begin creating content for that audience.
Audit your Website’s Content
Often a lot of people create content they want to create. Whether their audience wants to see that content is irrelevant to them.
Is that the right strategy? We’re not sure.
While a creative artist shouldn’t pander to what people want, their artistic freedom should work within the parameters of what people want or like to see/hear/watch etc.
Creativity is not about forcing people or expecting them to enjoy whatever you create.
If you can’t create content that people actually want to consume, you will not be successful.
Which is why analytics is as much a part of success, as creativity is.
This is where a website content audit comes into play. It should be done regularly and any content that is not serving your purpose should either be recreated, repurposed or deleted.
Solve Problems for your Customer
It’s great talking about your amazing products and services and bigging yourself up. But how is that helping the customer?
Helpful content with the right language and good information that solves a problem for your customer will have a much bigger and profound effect.
Make a list of problems your customers face regularly, or might face, and provide free solutions instead of worrying about how to create content for website. ;)
How to Create Content for Website with the Right Voice and Tone
Your brand’s language will dictate how your readers feel when they land on your website. Which is why it’s important to avoid internal jargons and keep it simple.
If you use technical content, explain what it means for newbies. It takes a few seconds and won’t alienate your more technical-minded audience.
Make Your Content Easy to Read
Assume that most of your readers are busy, which they are.
In this digital age of constant distractions, social media overload and short attention spans, make sure you write short, simple sentences.
This research study done by Ghent University in Belgium shows that the average reading rate for adults in English is 238 words per minute (wpm) for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction.
That is much lower than the long-held belief of 300 wpm.
Add Pictures and Videos (If needed)
If you think a picture, video or an infographic can help you get your point across to the reader, don’t hesitate to do so.
Vast majority of people absorb information better when it’s visual.
Make a Content Schedule and Stick to It
When you want to develop an audience, consistency is key.
Create a content schedule and stick to it religiously. You will have good and bad days.
Even if you make small progress on a bad day, that is enough! As long as you’re moving forward, that’s all that matters.
Get Feedback and Find the Right People
Instead of having yes men around you, surround yourself with the right people and get feedback, even if it is criticism that is constructive, in order to improve.
Measure and Track Performance
If you don’t know where you stand, you can’t know where you’re going. There are some free tools that help you get started on measuring and tracking your content performance like:
Ways to Speed Up Content Creation
Dictation
If writing or creating content doesn’t come naturally to you, one of the best ways to get readymade content for your website is to record your ideas on a digital recorder or a smartphone.
This is especially convenient given how busy we all have become. How? You can record ideas on the move, whether you’re walking, cycling, driving, cooking or doing chores around the house.
We don’t recommend recording while driving, but if it can be done without interrupting your focus, like with the help of a hands-free device, then by all means try it a traffic-free zone first before driving on busy roads.
Once you are done recording your thoughts, you can either transcribe it yourself, or have the audio files securely transcribed by a transcription service or software.
How to Create Content for Website with Audio/Video Transcription
Transcribing your podcast or radio shows are not only easier ways to get content for your website, they also have added SEO benefits.
How? Let me explain.
When Google’s bots crawl your website or channel — yes, I know sounds sci-fi, but in simple words, when Google examines the content on your website, it cannot listen to audio or watch videos.
Even if your primary mode of content creation is video or audio, you need to provide a description that lets Google know what your podcast/video is about.
This analysis of 11.8 million Google search results shows us some very important, key findings:
- “3. Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth.”
- “8. We discovered that word count was evenly distributed among the top 10 results. The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words.”
- “12. Websites with above-average “time on site” tend to rank higher in Google. Specifically, increasing time on site by 3 seconds correlates to ranking a single position higher in the search results.”
Based on which, here are some of our recommendations:
- No matter how detailed your description of your video/podcast is, it will not be as “in-depth” as an entire transcript of your show.
- Long-tail content, or content longer than 1000 or 1,500 words rank significantly higher in Google. Exercise your typing fingers. OR just have your audio/video transcribed by professionals and copy paste the text on your website, simples.
- This study on Facebook users shows that 85% of Facebook users watch videos on mute. Chances are a vast majority of users too would rather read the transcript or subtitles.
- Time spent on site helps your ranking on Google. A full transcript of your podcast or video helps people stay longer on your website.
Don’t be Afraid to ‘Get Inspired’
A lot of people are under the misapprehension that unless they create completely brand new, original content from scratch, they are not creative.
And when they can’t, they give up.
But that’s not how creativity works.
History has shown that everything great that’s ever been created, has been inspired by something else before it.
So don’t limit yourself, research the internet, find articles in your niche and see how you can improve them and help people in your own way. That will get the ball rolling.
Hire a Freelance Writer or a Service
If you’re not going to record interviews or you’re too busy to write content yourself, you can hire freelancers to do so on websites like:
Please use caution though, as confidentiality may be an issue with freelancers. The services mentioned above do help you with confidentiality agreements and you can create a tailor-made confidentiality agreement for your needs. Plenty of free templates available online.
You can also use a content writing service or agency who will sign a legal confidentiality agreement.
Contact us for more info and we may be able to help you with this.
Publish Reviews of Press Releases from Brands in your Niche
If you follow a major brand or company that’s related to your niche, you can review their press releases on your website.
Make sure to not copy paste the exact same content. A safer option is to link to their press release and post a review below it.
If there’s a video of the press release, you can get your video transcribed and either publish the entire transcript on your website, or edit/paraphrase as a unique article of your own.
The possibilities are endless.
Translate and Transcribe
If a key brand in your niche don’t publish a transcript of their press releases, you can do so on your own website and make things easier for your audience.
Especially if their press release isn’t in English, you can offer either translated transcripts or subtitles to help your audience.
Plenty of translation services online that can help you do this.
Let us know what you think in the comments below. Or if you think we’ve missed out on something, feel free to leave your suggestions below.
If you think we can help you in any way, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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