Executive summary: for a website to be truly successful, it
can't just be a shopping cart, a page full of advertisements,
or a lead capture form. You can keep such sites alive with
massive advertising outlays. But to enjoy natural traffic,
a website needs to be a destination that people actually
want to go to willingly. And that requires some kind of content.
Almost every successful website is built on content, as I'll
show with some big-name examples.
If you think about it, there is not a single solitary major
successful website that is not based on content. It's amazing
how often businesses on the web forget about this. Partly
that's because we've come to think of content so narrowly,
usually as static text.
Certainly, most content is text, and text usually presents
by far the best return on investment. In no small part because
it’s a magic amulet that draws search engine traffic
to a website like suitors to an unmarried princess. But there
are other kinds of content besides text. These other kinds
of content include games, quizzes, and other interactives,
but above all, images. In short, no major website has ever
gotten along without some kind of content. True, you can
advertise your way to the top, but that's a whole lot of
free web traffic, not to mention mindshare, goodwill, and
sales opportunities to pass up.
Don't believe me? Let's look at some of the web's most phenomenally
successful sites and how they depend on content. For the
sake of argument, I'll leave out the sites everyone would
recognize as content sites, such as newspaper sites and online
magazines such as cnet.com, bankrate.com and salon.com
Oft-overlooked Content-Based Sites
- Google. Content: the search results. Would you use Google
if it were just the ads and the spare graphic design? No,
you go to Google because it produces the best search results.
You may not usually think of the search results as content,
but they are–and some of the most carefully planned
content on the web. An untold investment of cash and brilliance
has gone into every single page of search results Google
has ever produced. It may not be art, but it's certainly
a lot more than spare design and little advertisements.
- Yahoo and MSN. Aside from search results, numbers two
and three in the search game boost their traffic with informational
articles and news, including some of the catchiest headlines
in the world. Yahoo also complements its articles with
games.
- Match.com The ultimate in user-contributed content: members'
pictures, profiles, and personal descriptions are the content
on this site. Match.com stands out among the personals
sites for beefing up this content with professionally written
articles and even some seemingly high-tech personality
profiling webware.
- Naughty picture sites. Responsible for perhaps 25% of
all web traffic, the seeming bonanza won by sites offering
naughty-naughty pictures convinces many people that content
isn't necessary. But these sites are all about content.
Only the content is rarely text and most often images or
videos (at least, that's what I've been told by informants
who know people who know people who've visited these sites).
This sector has not gotten wealthy through links, advertising,
and check-out pages alone.
- Play-for-money sites. This is a category of sites I dare
not mention by name for fear of this article being filtered
before it can reach you. These sites have been phenomenally
successful at separating the gullible, curious, addicted
and just plain stupid from their money. Again, there aren't
many articles here, but the games themselves are content
enough.
- Craiglist. The ultimate bastion of user-contributed content,
this site is remarkable for its near abandonment of graphic
design, advertising, and artificial SEO, the mainstays
of most website budgets. Craislist owes its phenomenal
success to giving people a space to say whatever they want
to say, and putting their words front, center, and everywhere
else.
- Amazon. No small part of Amazon's leg up on the competition
comes from content, particularly text. Amazon displays
every shred of information the manufacturers or publishers
provide about an item, not just the tiny blurb most sites
rely on. Then there are the famous customer reviews. Finally,
Amazon puts a finishing touch on its content with professionally
crafted reviews written especially for the Amazon site.
Don't think all this is important? How often have you bought
something from Amazon after not having read through a good
part of the information on the page?
I've deliberately chosen the above sites because they don't
rely exclusively on articles, the most traditional type of
web content. Still, for most sites, articles are the way
to go. Their natural advantages include the facts that they
are magnets for search engine traffic, and have a built-in
audience in the still millions-strong group of literate web
users, who may not like images or interactive content as
much.
In short, while you can throw advertising at a lead capture
form or shopping cart and make it successful, for truly natural
success, a site needs something that makes people want to
come on their own. And that means you need content, whether
naughty pictures, unique web-software, or well-written articles.
About the author: Joel Walsh writes extensively about web
content and marketing, and owns UpMarket, a service dedicated
to writing
web content: http://www.UpMarketContent.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.c
|
