Most site owners understand that adding great content on their site on a regular basis is important. Some think of it more as a “nice-to-have” sort of thing, rather than a must-have for their business. Few people truly understand just how crucial great content is to a succesful online strategy.

The fact is, great content can literally make or break your web business. In this post, I’ll show you how.

First, let’s review the benefits that great content can bring to your site. There are 2 main types of benefits, each with 5 primary benefits wtihin them:

1.       Off-Site - Promotional/Marketing Benefits  (Getting people to your site)

2.       On-Site Benefits (Getting people to take action once on your site)

Off-Site - Promotional/Marketing Benefits

Here’s a list of the promotional and marketing benefits that having great content can bring:

1.       Turns your site into an authority on your topic

2.       Entices other site owners to link to your site. These links can drive traffic

3.       These In-bound links may increase your link popularity, which is a major factor in how high you rank in the search engines

4.       Word-of-mouth marketing. People tell others about your site’s content

5.       Viral marketing. Great content can sometimes cause a fast, widespread traffic increase, by either word of mouth or through other news or blog channels

Great content is the most dependable, legitimate, long-term strategy for driving free traffic to your website. Period. There are plenty of online marketers who will disagree with me, but usually you’ll discover that they’re selling their own techniques or tools to drive traffic. Some of these techniques will drive traffic faster than content will, but most of the time, these shortcuts are not endorsed by Google or the search engines. Using the wrong techniques to drive traffic to your site, whether done by you directly, or by your SEO firm you hired, can get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines… it happens all the time.

High quality content development is the only legitimate technique that Google recommends to build your site into an authoritative resource that will entice people to link to you and cause your site to rank high over time.

For more information about which techniques are approved and not approved by Google, you can read our articles entitled “What is All Natural SEO”, “Hiring an SEO – What Does Google Think”, and “Link Building Techniques – What does Google Think?”

On-Site Benefits

So now you understand how great content can drive lots of free search engine traffic to your site. However, the goal isn’t just to get people to your site… the goal is to get people to take action on your site! This is where the power of content really shines.

Here’s a list of the benefits that great content can bring after people get to your site:

1.       Gives something of value to your visitors. People always appreciate when you give them something for free before asking them to give you something back

2.       Builds trust with your visitors. By answering their questions, they will see that you are a trusted authority on your topic

3.       Increases the “stickiness” of your site. People will stay longer during each visit sine there is now a reason to stay and get more information

4.       Increases the amount of repeat-visits to your site. Why would people come back to your site if there is nothing new there to see?

5.       Increases conversion rates! The longer you can keep people on your site, and the more they come back to your site, the higher the chance they will end up purchasing your products or services.

Killer Content = Higher Conversion Rates = More Revenue

Benefits 1 through 4, listed above, all serve to cause Step 5. After all, the goal here is to get results… which means getting people to take action on your site. While this may seem like common sense, many site owners who are good at getting people to land on their site aren’t quite as skilled at getting people to actually take action once they’re there.

To get results, you need to create simple, powerful, yet effective landing pages to place your content on. To learn how to do this, read our Step by Step Guide on How to Create Action-Oriented Landing Pages.

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