Great content — what a terrible, horrible phrase. What, exactly, constitutes
great content? Isn’t “great” content kind of like a college (or a high school) literature
course? Remember those? You go to this class, and the instructor thrusts
a book at you and says, “You must read this and tell me what it means.”
Great. I would read those books, but the meaning I found was never the same
as the meaning the instructor found in them. I always got so-so grades in literature
because of it, and I still don’t understand. Who is that instructor to
tell me what that writer was thinking when he or she wrote that piece of literature?
Was the instructor sitting on the writer’s shoulder during the writing
process? Or maybe the writer dialed up the future and asked the instructor
for direction on what should be written? Not likely.
Literature is subjective — as is content. What I think is great content might
absolutely drive the next visitor to your site completely insane. He could find
the article boring or lively, instructing or condescending. Every person interprets
what’s put before them differently.
That doesn’t mean that great content can’t be achieved, though. It’s more
accurate to call it appealing content — your content should appeal to the
majority of visitors that land on that page. The truth is you can’t purchase,
steal, borrow, or copy anything that will appeal to everyone. What you have to
shoot for is content that appeals to the majority, and there are some guidelines
for writing to the majority of people that will land on any one of your pages.
Knowing your audience
Before you can put anything on paper (or on-screen as is the case here), you
have to know who you’re addressing. If you’ve done any targeting research
on your Web site, you already have some of this information. If you haven’t,
you’d better get to it. The only way you’ll ever reach your audience in the
first place is to have a Web site that’s well targeted to them.
Here’s an example: Say you own the Web site Greenparenting.com (in real
life, the site actually forwards to GreenForGood.com, but we’re talking hypothetical
here). Just looking at the name for that site, you automatically know
that the site should be targeted to parents who are environmentally responsible.
Now, what you need to know is who those people are.
If you know your industry, you can do a little research and find out that the
people who would be interested in green parenting are probably upper-middle
class adults in their late 20s to early 50s. These are people who fall into the
parenting age. Being environmentally friendly isn’t cheap, so a decent income
is required to be truly dedicated.
Now you have a profile. Your site visitors have these characteristics:
They’re parents.
They’re in their late 20s to early 50s.
They have a household income of $75,000 or more.
They’re concerned about the environment.
As you’re reading through those few facts, you should already have a picture
of these Web site visitors in your mind. If you haven’t done the spadework
necessary to come up with a picture of a typical visitor to your own Web site,
do it now. You can’t accurately target anything on your Web site until you
know who you’re serving. That includes creating content that your visitors
are looking for and that they want to read.
Language considerations
The language that you use in your content can be addressed on a couple different
levels. First, is the what language do most of your readers speak level.
Obviously, this level is completely out of your control. It makes no sense
at all to create content for your site in English if most of your visitors are
Japanese.
If you have any doubts at all about the native language of your visitors, look at
your analytics software. Most analytics packages have some element of tracking
visitors based on their language. In Google Analytics (which I highly recommend
because it’s very user-friendly and FREE!), the actual report is in with
a group of reports that segment users according to differing characteristics,
such as language location.
A language report tells you the native language of each of your site visitors
based on what’s set as the default language in their Web browser.
A different aspect of language is the words that you actually use to communicate
with your visitors. I can quote you all kinds of facts about how the average
person reads at an 8th-grade level or how readers perceive words on a
screen differently than how they perceive words on a page — all that is true.
What’s more important to understand about the language that you use to
communicate with your visitors is that it should be familiar to them.
Jargon (those words that are inevitably coined for every topic on the planet;
really, every topic can be explained with jargon) isn’t familiar. For example,
analytics is actually jargon. It’s used to mean Web site traffic statistics.
Analytics is actually a derivative of the word analyze, which means to examine
critically. So, by definition then, analytics would be the science of analyzing.
Yet, I use it most frequently when associated to Web site traffic statistics.
The problem with jargon is that if you stay immersed in a subject long
enough, it becomes part of your normal speech and thought patterns.
Unfortunately, that might not be true for your Web site visitors.
If you place an article or blog post on your Web site that’s full of jargon and
your site visitors don’t view that jargon from the same perspective as you,
they’ll get frustrated very quickly. Visitors don’t want to struggle through
articles and blog posts filled with terms that seem to be used as part of some
coded language. (BBC World War II Upper Class Twit Announcer Voice: “The
geese are carrying the potatoes over the vicar’s pond. I repeat: The geese are
carrying the potatoes over the vicar’s pond.”) They want to skim your stuff,
pluck out the information they need like the ripest and sweetest grapes, and
move on. Jargon slows them down, so don’t use it.
If you do find that jargon is necessary in your content, be sure to explain
what it means the first time it appears in any article or blog post. The idea is
to make your content as easy to read as possible without being overly simplistic.
This is where it gets a little tricky.
If you’re too simplistic in the language that you use in your content, most
readers are turned off. I find it’s usually best to choose one person that represents
your audience and write your content so that person can understand
it. For me, it’s my best friend, who happens to be a serious technophobe while at
the same time being one of the most intelligent people I know. I write with her in
mind, phrasing things in such a way that I don’t insult her intelligence and yet get
the fundamentals of (an at times rather complicated) technology across.
If I can write about technology at a level that she understands but that
doesn’t grate on her nerves, I count myself successful. Use the same trick
with your site visitors. Think of someone you know who represents your
readers, assume his or her knowledge of your topic isn’t as deep as your
own, and then write to that person. If necessary, you can even ask that
person to read what you’ve written the first few times. If he has questions,
he’ll ask. If he understands it and the language doesn’t annoy him, you know
you’re on the right track.
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