Keeping your website active and alive

If you haven't known about Inbound Marketing, it's worth checking out as it's an online marketing strategy that has been proven to actually brings in real results. Basically, Inbound Marketing is a technique for drawing customers to your products and services via content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. This marketing strategy proposes that businesses should focus on first building trust and connection with potential customers by offering them something useful such as tips, tutorials, guides, valuable information that benefits the users.

It's obvious that keeping the content of the website fresh and always up-to-dated to is the core requirement of Inbound Marketing. Whether you buy in the strategy or not, if you have a blog, corporate website or ecommerce store, keeping your website’s content updated and fresh on a regular basis is a necessary yet difficult task. On the other hand, the benefits of doing so – especially the long term benefits are well worth the effort.

• It’s good for SEO – Search engines love content and especially new and unique content. They like to have long quality posts in their index to satisfy their users. A website that is updated regularly is crawled more often, has more pages in the search index and more possibilities to boost SEO by applying internal linking best practices.
• It’s good for social media – If you are using social media marketing to promote your website, you know that one of the most critical success factors is the content you post on your social media pages. Many times the problem that destroys your effort is lack of content. Having a website that is updated frequently will also give you fuel for your social media promotions.
• It’s good for your users – Websites are meant to serve users and giving users fresh content makes them happier. A happy user will most probably come back, convert, register, buy or recommend your website to other people.
• It’s a signal that your website or business is active and alive – Imagine visiting 2 identical websites selling the same product at the same price but one of them has an updated blog, support forum or news section. Other things being equal, which one would you trust? The one that has updated content gives you the feeling that it is still in operation, active and that they care about their customers. The same is true when you visit a product support forum. If the last update done on the forum was 2 years ago, would you trust that company and buy their product knowing that their support is non-existent?

Before you start writing, however, it's very important that you have a plan. Your resource is limited and you have to make sure that every single second you spend is worth it. You need to think of what you should write, how you should write, when to post, where to post,.... This is Content Strategy which I will cover in another post.