My job is to help my clients get new clients. My main method of doing this is online via their website. Pretty much everything I do revolves around the content on their website yet the majority of my time is spent on projects where the content is an afterthought. For years I have known that this is a poor situation that I need to rectify by placing more focus on content strategy.
How do we get good content on the web?
Recently I listened to the 5by5 Web Ahead Podcast on Content with Kristina Halverson.
5by5 content podcast
Content with Kristina Halvorson
July 27, 2012 at 4:00pm – 1 hour 5 minutes
How do we get good content on the web? Kristina Halvorson joins Jen Simmons to talk about the discipline of content strategy, where it came from and where it’s going. We also get into fear and life and how to make change in an environment that needs it.
As web marketers we spend a lot of time talking about standards, browsers, mobile, SEO, conversions, UI, and anything else that is geeky and cool. The problem is that clients and customers are more interested in getting information that pertains to their needs. A user searching for an accountant is less impressed that the website shows up on my iPhone formatted and fast, they expect this. What they are impressed with is when the content on the accountants page is exactly what they looking for and leads them to call the business for services.
Therefore the things that we as web marketers spend the most time on is what users care about the least, yet the thing that for the most part we spend the least amount of time on, content, is what users care about the most. We need to put content first and then frame the rest around that. When designing the site we should not be using Lorem Ipsum but placing the actual content that will go live just like we do with images.
What’s the point?
The Discipline of Content Strategy by KRISTINA HALVORSON
This is Kristina’s initial article from 2008 getting everyone in the web world to take notice that content has been relegated to a lorem ipsum status for too long. By making content a secondary concept it has lead to greater frustration amongst everyone involved with creating websites. This article gives a roadmap of questions and guidelines to start considering when putting a content strategy together.
But who among us is asking the scary, important questions about content, such as “What’s the point?” or “Who cares?” Who’s talking about the time-intensive, complicated, messy content development process? Who’s overseeing the care and feeding of content once it’s out there, clogging up the tubes and dragging down our search engines?
Kristina on Twitter
She is very active and has a lot of followers.
Braintraffic Blog
Kristina’s company blog. has a number of updates per month all pretty in depth.
Contents is an online magazine for readers who create, edit, publish, analyze, and care for the contents of the internet. We publish in open, themed issues that run for about eight weeks. When we’re publishing an issue, a new article appears most Wednesdays.
We are biased toward open access, reader-friendly design and policy, quality over quantity, and the creation of usable beautiful things.
Conclusion
Overall this podcast is a great jumping off point in talking about Content Strategy. There are numerous references to tools and techniques but you will want to search further to get more information on the specifics. In the mean time I would suggest making content a more integral part of your team and client conversations.
If you are not a writer you may want to practice becoming one. Even if you don’t create anything for your clients it will help you when talking with them about it. Knowing how difficult a task is will help empathize more when the client cannot get you what you want. When you go to hire a copywriter it will help you understand deadlines and how to create a brief more completely so you will spend less time re-editing and more time moving forward to the next project.
What do you think? How is your content created? Are you happy with what you are filling the tubes up with?