8 Business Growth Goals You Can Conquer with Great Content

Content, content, content

Let’s be honest: creating great content on a regular basis can be a real drag.

After all, you didn't get into this business to be a writer any more than to be a salesperson, an accountant or a lawyer. However, just as you can't neglect to fill your sales pipeline or pay your bills or protect your company’s assets, you can't ignore your content.

Why is content so important? Because it's the fuel that propels your business growth engine. Whether you call it a blog, a magazine, a resource library or a newsletter, your content is the one weapon in your arsenal that can help you conquer nearly every challenge of growing a company in today's marketplace:

1. Increasing visibility and driving traffic

You can’t win a customer that can’t find you. And more often than not, today’s customer is looking for you online, which is why it’s critical to optimize your organic search ranking.

People tend to think of SEO as if it's some occult form of black magic. While the practice of SEO is certainly complex, the one thing you must remember is that even though search engines are driven by intricate algorithms, all of those metrics and calculations are founded in delivering high-quality, relevant results that will be the most useful to real people.

Real people value good content. As a result, so do Google, Bing and Yahoo.

There’s no more rock-solid SEO strategy than publishing great original content on a regular basis. As you develop valuable, (legitimately) keyword-rich content that becomes popular through page views and inbound links, your level of perceived authority on that subject will increase in the eyes of the search engines, which in turn will boost your ranking in searches that pertain to your core offering. And the higher you climb in the rankings, the more potential customers will be able to find you.

2. Attracting more targeted traffic

If all you want is to send your site visit stats through the roof, there are plenty of attention-grabbing stunts you can pull to draw sheer numbers.

But numbers don't necessarily equate to dollars. For your business to grow, you need to consistently attract the types of people to your site whose needs and interests are the most closely aligned with the products or services you have to offer.

This is where your content steps up to the plate. When you publish unique, insightful information that appeals to your tribe, you'll attract visitors that will become your fans, spread the word about you, bring their friends and, ultimately, turn into customers.

3. Building trust and converting customers

Bringing visitors to your site is just the first step. Your job isn’t done until you convince them to entrust their hard-earned dollars to you.

The task of building trust with a prospect when you're standing in front of them is a relatively straightforward proposition.

However, you don't always have the luxury of a face-to-face encounter to make a first impression. Instead, more often than not, you're relegated to building trust through a computer screen. And thanks to all the Internet con artists and shysters out there, the burden of proof you must overcome to establish your trustworthiness is a large one.

So what options do you have? You can always sing your own praises in the most flattering and superlative fashion. Of course, that doesn't hold much sway in the absence of solid evidence to support your claims.

Don’t just cross your fingers and hope that your customers will buy into your sales pitch. Instead, let your content make the case for you.

Your content is the proving ground for your expertise. If you’re a big phony and you don’t know what you’re talking about, it will become obvious pretty quickly. But if you have something of genuine value to offer, and you give it away willingly upfront before you ask anyone to spend a dime, that’s where real online trust-building begins.

4. Differentiating your company from your competitors

Your company doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are plenty of other people who do what you do and sell what you sell. For your business to grow, you must be able to make a compelling case for why people should buy from you rather than the other guys.

This is a challenge that dates back to the genesis of marketing, but in the Age of Information, it’s one that great content can go along way toward helping you overcome.

Make no mistake: your content is not your sales pitch. But if you can provide truly useful information that your customers can’t find elsewhere, you’re making an implicit case for the benefits of doing business with you.

For example, let’s say you’re a general contractor, and you’ve created a comprehensive online resource library for homeowners that covers all things home improvement-related: the latest renovation trends, how-tos for simple DIY projects, advice on upgrades that deliver the best ROI, etc.

This is the type of information that your potential clients will truly value. And by demonstrating your authority, you’ll prove that what you have to offer is much more than just a common commodity, which will even help you fend off lower-priced competitors. Your customers won’t care as much about saving a few dollars if they feel more confident knowing their project is in the hands of a trustworthy expert.

5. Generating word-of-mouth marketing

You live in the world of your products and services. You eat, breathe and sleep your business. Talking about what you do is second nature to you.

The same does not hold true for your customers. They don't go through life looking for opportunities to be your walking, talking billboard.

However, great content has the power to get people talking. Everyone loves information that gives them ways to save time and money, makes life easier or gets their creative ideas flowing.

And in the culture of the Web, we're all hard-wired to be like-button-pushers and retweeters. So when you give your customers good stuff that sparks their interest, they’ll be instinctively inclined to share it with others, and your name will travel far and wide right along with the content you’ve created as it passes through their networks and their friends' networks, too.

6. Expanding your customer base

The interminable task of business growth is identifying sources of new potential customers and finding ways to get in front of them. This quest is what's kept the purveyors of mailing lists in business for decades.

But in today's Web marketing universe, you don't have to shell out thousands of dollars to gain exposure to new customers. Communities exist everywhere around the Web, and your content is your foot in the door.

All you have to do is identify those whose tribes’ interests align with your products or services, and offer to provide content for their websites. In exchange for giving away your valuable expertise, you'll have the opportunity to take the stage in front of a brand new audience of potential customers, who will be more receptive to what you have to say due to the cache of trust conveyed to you by the established leader of that tribe.

If you’re an event planner, for example, you could approach the owner of a popular local blog targeted to moms and offer to write an article on a timely topic of interest, such as “10 Trendy Summer Birthday Party Themes.”

Without ever having to make a direct pitch for your services, you’ll suddenly have a new tribe of potential customers who know who you are, and if you’ve done a good job, will likely be inclined to click through to your website to see what other ideas and information you have to offer. In terms of exposure to your target demographic, your content-driven approach will deliver a greater ROI than traditional advertising ever could.

7. Building community and keeping customers engaged

You wouldn’t hand a customer a brochure and expect them to wake up every day excited to read it over and over again.

The same holds true for your website. You can’t expect to build community around a vanilla site that’s all about you and your product or service offering. No matter how beautifully crafted it might be, there's nothing to keep people coming back. They'll get the basic information they need, and they'll move on.

Great content is the key to transforming your company’s website into the hub of a thriving online community. People don’t want to interact with brands; they want to interact with other people. Content puts a human face on your company and makes your brand approachable. It’s the common ground between your company and your customers.

And not only is your content the spark that ignites conversation, but it's also the fuel on the fire that keeps it going. When you recognize and respond to those who comment on and share your posts, you make them feel like they’re part of something meaningful and give them added motivation to invite others to join the party.

8. Driving innovation

One of the best fringe benefits of the task of researching and writing top-quality content is that it forces you to keep up with what’s going on in your industry.

When you’re trying to build your business, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. You get so deeply immersed in the day-to-day nuts and bolts that you don’t make time for the big-picture thinking that’s required to reach the next level.

Creating content requires you to be a perpetual student of what you do; to be constantly reading and exploring so that you have fresh, exciting ideas to share with your readers.

This, in turn, makes you a sharper, more confident, more agile businessperson. Rather than doing things as they’ve always been done, you’ll be on top of the trends and ahead of the curve, with an overabundance of inspiration for what to try next.

What you put in is what you get out

Just like anything else, what you put into your content it is exactly what you'll get out of it.

If you want your content to help you meet your business growth goals, it has to be the real deal. It has to be meaningful. It has to be unique. It has to be too valuable to ignore. It has to address real problems and issues that are relevant to your customers. It has to offer practical solutions and insightful tips that are so good they’ll eagerly await your next post and gladly pass along your links to others.

Creating content of this caliber takes time. It takes hard work. Most importantly it takes discipline and commitment. If you don't make yourself buckle down and hammer out the good stuff week after week and month after month, you’ll quickly lose your audience to someone who will.

On the other hand, when you faithfully publish the type of content your customers crave, the reward is a sales engine that’s so powerful and so robust, you’ll put your company in a competitive position anyone would envy.

Read more:

Shut Up and Blog Already

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Jacob Gube: Simplifying the Formula for Success

The secret to the success of Six Revisions is, in fact, not a secret at all. They have a singular purpose – providing “Useful Information for Web Developers & Designers” – and they serve it relentlessly. This straightforward, no-frills approach with an emphasis on quality, comprehensiveness and usefulness is exactly what drives the popularity of Six Revisions. The site has cemented its reputation among the development and design community for publishing consistently exceptional content written by talented professionals who not only practice but have a true passion for their craft. Recently Fame Foundry had the opportunity to talk with Jacob Gube, Six Revisions’ founder and chief editor, about what it takes to build a community around content, what he’s learned along the way and what lies ahead for the Web and web development. FAME FOUNDRY: Please tell us a bit about your professional background. How did you get your start as a web developer? JACOB GUBE: I got started as a web developer by doing freelance graphic design work. It was something that just fell into my lap. Companies that I did design work for frequently also needed a website, and they’d often ask me, “Do you know someone who can get a website up for us?” Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity, I’d say, “I’ll give it a shot!” And that’s how I got my start. FAME FOUNDRY: What was your first big web development project? JACOB GUBE: In terms of scope, the first big web development project I had was for a company called Eclipse Window Tinting. They offered car window-tinting services and wanted a Web presence as a way to drive traffic to their store. The site had a MySQL database for providing estimates based on car make and model, year and window tint type with a simple web app that calculated the price. It also featured an image gallery of cars they’d tinted using the original Lightbox script to open large-scale images inside a modal window after clicking on its thumbnail, which was still pretty fresh and new at the time. FAME FOUNDRY: What do you love about web development? Is there anything about it that you don’t enjoy? JACOB GUBE: I love the idea of being able to reach people who have an Internet connection with the products that we create. It doesn’t matter whether they’re just next door or thousands of miles away, they will still be able to interface and use the things we make. I can’t think of one thing that I don’t enjoy about web development. Maybe supporting old browsers like IE6, which can be frustrating at times. FAME FOUNDRY: How did Six Revisions come into existence? JACOB GUBE: It came into existence on a whim. I was just coming off a failed start-up for a blog that would discuss news and reviews of technology gadgets – sort of like Engadget. It failed because we didn’t really have a passion for the subject, so producing content was difficult. That experience taught me one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about business: in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to believe in and have passion for your product. I started Six Revisions a few weeks after that experience. I just woke up one day itching to start a blog. I asked myself, “What am I really good at? What can I write about and never be bored of?” By the end of that day, I had a site about web development and design up and running, a domain name secured and my first post published. FAME FOUNDRY: What was your goal when you started out? Did you aim for this level of popularity, or did it begin as more of an outlet for your personal interests? JACOB GUBE: Six Revisions was never about popularity, subscribership, page views or profit margins. It was a personal side project – an outlet for me to share the things I learned while working as a professional web developer. I didn’t expect people would even read the site, but I guess they liked what I had to say and kept coming back. FAME FOUNDRY: What is the origin of the name? JACOB GUBE: In graphic design, you usually have rounds of revision after you produce a design for a client, so that’s where “Revisions” came from. Web developers and designers often have to go through these revision cycles as well. The number “Six” is arbitrary; it just sounded good to me at the time. I didn’t spend too much time picking out a name. I wanted a site up. FAME FOUNDRY: What were some of the influences that helped you shape the site? JACOB GUBE: I’d say, of course, the only real design blog out at the time, which was very popular then and still continues to be today, Smashing Magazine. My earlier work, though, was influenced greatly by Samuel Ryan’s Wake Up Later as well as Lifehacker. FAME FOUNDRY: How did you know that Six Revisions was going to be big? JACOB GUBE: I didn’t know Six Revisions was going to be big. I hadn’t anticipated for the growth, and I was ill-prepared. In the beginning, I had to move web servers five times in a span of maybe three months because the demand kept increasing, and no host could withstand the type of traffic the site was getting. That’s why my newest web start-up, Design Instruct, had a much longer planning phase and better infrastructure that scales as the demand goes up. Design Instruct is the fruit of my two years of experience with Six Revisions. Couple that with an amazing business partner, my brother Isaac Gube, and we’ve witnessed growth much faster than Six Revisions. FAME FOUNDRY: Was there any one moment or event that you attribute as your “big break”? JACOB GUBE: Our big break was being featured on Digg for the first time. That took our traffic and subscribership from basically zero to a very sizable amount. If I were to pick one single catalyst that took Six Revisions from a hobby to a company, it’d be the Digg community. You can see how much I value Digg by looking at the layout of each post: the Digg button is the first thing you see on an article. FAME FOUNDRY: How long did you wait for that first break? JACOB GUBE:: I’d say I had to wait maybe one or two months. FAME FOUNDRY: Did you ever get impatient or doubt your chances of success in the process? JACOB GUBE: Here’s the thing: I never really had any goals or milestones that I needed to meet. I don’t think I have them now. To me, when you build a product, all you have to do is work hard on it and let your passion show, and the rest will take care of itself. I didn’t get impatient or doubt my chances because I had no aspirations to be successful. FAME FOUNDRY: You’ve said that you prefer to let things grow organically in order to allow for creativity and flexibility. How has this played out over the history of Six Revisions? JACOB GUBE: Letting things grow on their own has worked out really well for me. When you have your five-year goal-setting, your meetings about meetings, your team-building exercises and your drawn-out private beta testing, you’re wasting the time that you could be spending on making your product better. To me, building a website or web app is simple: You do it. Your users tell you what you need to work on, and you do that. This mentality has played out very well with both Six Revisions and Design Instruct because when you start with a blank slate, you let your users shape your website. Any other development philosophy besides that is guesswork. FAME FOUNDRY: What happens behind the scenes at Six Revisions? What is a typical day for you? JACOB GUBE: I dedicate most of my time to the readers and the authors, both of which are what make the website what it is. The rest of the time is spent on making sure the site is running properly. A typical day for me begins early in the morning because that’s when I’m most productive. I do most of the creative work in the morning because I’m a morning person. Little time is spent on doing anything else: I’ll quickly scan my inbox to see if there are any pressing e-mails that need my attention and respond to those. Usually, e-mails that I respond to in the morning are from authors or readers. When my productivity and creativity are waning in the late afternoon, I do the administrative work – answering e-mails that I missed in the morning, accounting, site maintenance – all the tasks that you’d consider “boring.” FAME FOUNDRY: What are some of the challenges you see in running and growing an online magazine? JACOB GUBE: The biggest challenge will always be the lack of time. There are many things you need to do but very little time to do them. You need to move quickly and make speedy decisions or else you miss your window of opportunity. FAME FOUNDRY: Six Revisions has earned a reputation for great content. Where do you draw your inspiration from, and how do you channel that inspiration into content that is in demand among the design and development community? JACOB GUBE: I get a lot of inspiration from just making websites. Many of the posts I write were inspired directly by something I was working on that day. For example, my post about clean and simple websites was inspired by working on the design for Design Instruct. I feel that I have a good grasp on what designers and developers like because I am one, so I’m able to channel that inspiration into content that people enjoy reading. FAME FOUNDRY: Is good content hard to come by? JACOB GUBE: Good content is very hard to come by, especially in the field of web design and development. That’s because being a great web developer or designer and being a great writer don’t often come in one package. So when you find people who can do both, you try and hold onto them. FAME FOUNDRY: What do you look for in good content for Six Revisions? JACOB GUBE: My definition of good content is that which is well-articulated, provides solid arguments and is written by someone who’s actually done the thing they’re talking about. When you’re inexperienced about the subject you’re writing about, it’ll show. You can spend a lot of time researching a subject, but unless you’ve actually done it, you won’t be able to write about it as well as someone who has. FAME FOUNDRY: For those aspiring to use great content to create a community around their brand, what advice would you give? JACOB GUBE: You have to start publishing great content in order to get more great content. It’s the only way you’ll attract talented writers. When they see that you’re publishing great stuff, they will want to be a part of that. FAME FOUNDRY: You’re well-known for your affinity for minimalism – a philosophy that is as apparent in your site as in your personal workspace. Do you feel this helps you from an organizational standpoint, a creative standpoint or both? JACOB GUBE: Minimalism helps me in many aspects of my work and personal life. To me, a cluttered surrounding clouds your mind. You may not know it, but you might be feeling stressed or stifled because there’s so much stuff around you. When you live a life based not on how much stuff you have, but rather on how little stuff you have, you’ll find that you have more time to spend on things that really matter. From an organizational standpoint, you don’t have a lot of stuff to organize to start with, so it’s easy to keep things in check. From a creative perspective, when you’re comfortable and you’re not bogged down by “stuff” in your environment, you can output some pretty cool work. FAME FOUNDRY: Are you still active in web development, or is your time completely dedicated to the magazine? JACOB GUBE: I’m very active in web development. I wouldn’t be able to write about it effectively unless I was. FAME FOUNDRY: How do you see the Web evolving in the next few years? JACOB GUBE: In the next few years, I’m willing to wager that you’ll see simpler and cleaner designs. I think everyone’s had enough of the loud and bright-colored, 20-large-buttons-in-your-face web designs, so there will be a shift towards simplicity, cleanliness, and more thought-out user interfaces. FAME FOUNDRY: How do you see web development evolving with mobile platforms and the iPad? JACOB GUBE: I think the mobile web development industry is beginning to pick up. More and more web developers are thinking about engineering stuff for portability and mobility. That’s partly why I think simplicity will win in the next few years. Because of the current limitations of infrastructures, mobile designs need to be lightweight. They also need to be simple because the interface is limited by the controls and screen size. FAME FOUNDRY: What are your future plans for Six Revisions? JACOB GUBE: My only plan for Six Revisions is to continue the tradition of publishing great content written by great people. That’s my one and only recipe for growth and success. As the founder and chief editor of Six Revisions, co-founder and technical editor of Design Instruct and author of MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide, Jacob Gube provides both inspiration and practical instruction to thousands of peers in the web design and development community. He’s also an active web developer and designer himself specializing in front-end and PHP development – work that fuels the success of his blogs as the source of content enriched by his depth of experience. Follow Jacob on Twitter @sixrevisions.

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