Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Content is my current passion

In my last few mentoring sessions I've focused on website content and how it can make or break your site.

Why?

Because clients are having a social media backlash at me, and so I trick them into working on their content, which in turn will lead them happily down the path of social media. Watch out, I'm delightfully deceptive.

Review my posts from September 20, August 2 and way back in July 2009

And I found this great article - 10 simple ways to reduce friction

While it's not tourism focused, it's still relevant. I'm talking to all you operators with black backgrounds and white text. Please let's move on from the 90's.

All words on your website should inform the consumer about property details and entice them to contact you immediately. And make sure some of those words are your keywords. Win win.

Don't talk about you, talk about me... or don't talk about me, talk about you? Stop using the words We and Us, and use You and You're and You will.

When designing keep in mind colours, fonts and eye path. The easiest method is to find a comparable site and tell your developer you like that one. In the tourism market, people are browsing 10-30 different options and their eyes are starting to glaze over. You want them to feel like your site is a calm, organized, coherent oasis in a sea of internet sludge.

Images - make sure your images relate to your target market. If you're looking to attract more seniors, then have more seniors in your images.


So what have we done?

Not only have we reviewed and refreshed all our website content, we've pared it down to some tweetable sentences. Sneaky. Plus we can tweet some of the content that we pulled -> re-purposing.

Not only do we have new great relevant images on our website but we can also use some for our facebook and tweets -> re-purposing. And the outtakes are totally awesome for this purpose. Be fun and silly for a minute.

Yes, it's digital magic.