How to Write Great Content Articles That Will Impress Your Web Design Company
Posted on December 26, 2007 at 9:58 am by admin
If you have hired a web design company to develop your web site and online presence, but have decided to develop your own content and articles, you may be feeling a little intimidated while sitting in front of the blank screen. Here are some simple tips for writing your own articles for your web site:
1) Brainstorm. This is a tip that professional writers use all the time. Simply grab a number of colored pencils or pens and a large piece of paper. Write down, in no particular order, questions that your customers and clients have asked you, questions that friends and family have asked you when they first learned about your business, things that you are really proud of in your company, things that you feel your company does better than the competition, and ways that your company can help customers. Ideally, don’t write these in a big list but rather spaced out on the big page of paper. Each of these is potentially an article idea.
2) Go back to your big piece of paper. Now, circle those ideas that you feel are most promising. Especially take a close look at questions that your customers and clients tend to ask you. Chances are, your customers and clients will come to your web site looking for answers to just these questions. From each promising idea, draw several lines. At the end of each line, write down ideas that you can incorporate into the article. For example, if your business offers credit counseling and your customers tend to ask you “how can I turn my credit score around?”, you might want to circle that question on your brainstorming sheet, and around it you may wish to place some ideas that you can incorporate in the article. For example, you may want to include all the ideas you have for helping someone turn their credit score around.
3) Once you have an idea as well is your basic article points, you can sit down at the computer and start typing. If this makes you nervous, imagine that you are speaking to a customer on the telephone. Write down what you would say to the customer. If this still seems intimidating, take a voice recorder and speak your answer into the microphone. Then, transcribe what you have spoken.
4) Go over what you’ve written and make sure that it really serves the customer. Ideally, your article should help answer customer questions and should reassure them. What you should not be doing is providing a hard sell for your company. In most cases, you want your web site to be informative, but you do not want your web site to be just one big ad. Visitors do not like ads on web sites, and are more likely to seek out the competition if they feel they’re being pressured to buy something. In the above example of a credit counseling company, you may wish to provide a checklist of things that people can do turn their credit score around – things such as “reduce unnecessary luxuries” or “have payroll deduct 10% of your paycheck into a savings account.” At the very end of the article, you may include your business phone number and tell customers that they can call you for more information or to learn about services that can help them turn their credit score around. What you should not do is mention your company name several times throughout the article.