FREE tips for successful website content:

1) Focus on benefits. What have you got that could benefit your customers? For example: A car manufacturer is selling a car which features 5 airbags. The benefit is that you and your passengers will be safer in this car because of this feature. So, safety is the customer benefit. Knowing this can help you develop headlines, copy, pictures etc which will appeal to your customers.

2) Offer something for nothing. When visitors land on your webpage you need them to stay long enough to understand what you have to offer. This is also important from a search engine perspective (contact me for more on this). On this website we offer free guides. On your site it might be a free gift with first order, discount, or free download etc. The point is to keep them on your site for as long as possible and to capture their details...

3) Start building a business relationship. Try to collect contact details from anyone who is interested in your product or service. You can then use this information to stay in touch with them and move towards the stage where they trust you enough to do business with you. You can do this by asking for their details (the 'contact me' form on this page is one example) or you can offer a gift in exchange for ther details e.g. Enter your name and email address and we will email you our free guide to Alpine Skiing. On this site we offer a 'FREE Marketing Guide for 2008'

5) Structure your content. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of visitor - those who just want the key facts before acting and those who need plenty of supporting evidence. Research has shown that long pages of copy work better than short pages of facts, but they must be structured correctly. Focus on providing a service to the visitors to your site for great results.

• Write an eye-catching headline. As with brochures or advertising, headlines should grab the readers attention and stop them moving on. Spend plenty of time on your headlines and your visitors will stay longer.
  
  
• Draw visitors into your page with an interesting information or fact(s)
  
  
• Use bullet points high up on the page. Quick, easy-to-get information will satisfy those who make quick decisions and draw those who need more information further into your page.
  
  
• Use the space below the 'fold' (bottom of the screen) to provide detailed explanations and supporting evidence. This will satisfy those who need to be sure that you have what they need.

A page structured in this way will appeal to the widest possible number of visitors.

6) Create graphics which work for you. Our view on graphics is that they are a vitally important part of your marketing message and can help your site keep visitors for longer. The golden rule is to ensure that any graphics on your page are there for a reason. If there is not a business case for including it then take it off. A business case can be anything from showing pictures of product to using abstract images which convey a sense of mood e.g. waterfalls to convey natural ingredients in a cosmetics website. In general, we recommend that you stick to a small number of high quality, relevant graphics.

These tips and all the other free Marketing Tips on this website are available in a FREE guide (pdf). This guide contains information which you can act on immediately and will save you thousands of pounds at no cost to you. Just email your request to me here (put 'Top Tips' in the subject line) and we will send it back to you asap. See, we practise what we preach - see 3 above ;-)

If you would prefer not to reveal your email, just browse the pages on this site and copy the tips into a word document. This will give you a summary of the Top Tips Guide. Is that what they call a 'win/win' ?