Business Strategy and MarCom Services for the digital age

You may have very important content to spread across the Web – what you you do with it is another story! When creating online content for your product or business, you must ask yourself the following questions: can my content be easily shared, does my website design really represent my brand, is the content focusing more on the brand or myself, is my content worth reading (exciting, informational, etc.)…

According to Inbound Internet Marketing blog, HubSpot, below are the 7 fluff-free reasons your online content isn’t spreading:

1. Bad Web Design

If you website looks stuck in 1997 with a construction guy digging and music playing or like a run of the mill template, there is a lack of credibility and trust. Do you share content from sites that you don’t trust? I wish it wasn’t true, but looks matter. Think about first impressions. It is worth investing in a site that is functional and reflects your personality and brand.

2. Lacking Ease of Sharing

The best content is like peanut butter, easily spreadable. Easily spreadable doesn’t mean that it takes a scholar to find how to share easily via social networks, email, etc. Enabling your community, no matter how big or small to share with ease can make a huge difference. Do you have one click sharing?

3. Product Focused Content

The best content isn’t about your product. The harsh reality is nobody cares about any of our products. People do care about interests, passions, hobbies, solving their problems, getting answer to key questions, learning etc.For example, let’s pretend you sell dog food. A mistake is to make the content about the food. Meaning features and benefits.

The fix here is to focus on an interest or passion. People aren’t passionate about dog food. Instead, I bet there are plenty of people passionate about dogs. Training dogs, dog health, etc. A better play is for the content to focus on the bigger picture and not just the product.

4. Not-You Focused Content

Injecting personality, passion and quirks into your content? Always a good thing. Making it about you and how amazing you are. Yikes. Make it about them, not you. It will do better. Trust me.

5. Lack Of Passion

If you aren’t passionate about your content, it will show and will hinder progress. Nobody spreads half-baked material. If you can’t get excited and pumped up about your content, how can you expect anyone else to be?

6. Unclear, Boring Or Ridiculously Long Titles

I get it. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a piece of content by its title. Fair enough. However, the reality of the matter is titles matter, a lot. They matter for search engines and humans. When you have 50 titles in front of you, which ones jump out? Why? Spending time on titles is worth the time.

7. Oops, I Forgot My Marketing

We have all fell into this trap. You spend all the time creating the content and posting it and then no time is left to promote it. You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don’t spend time marketing and promoting it, then it will be the loneliest, saddest, greatest most useful content in the world.

HubSpot’s recommendation, especially when getting rolling is to spend 80% of total “content time” marketing and promoting. This means creating one-on-one connections on social media sites, expanding your network, digital schmoozing, perhaps hosting an event or meet up. Often the best online marketing happens offline.   Content plus connections equals success. You have to give to get.