Might as Well be Lorem Ipsum

Does your content capture your readers’ attention immediately? Does it engage them and not only play on their interest but encourage them to interact with your website further? If your website’s content, whether it’s a resource, a piece of page copy or a blog post doesn’t snag your readers’ interest immediately and then turn it into a conversion, you may as well be using Lorem Ipsum.

For those of you who don’t know what Lorem Ipsum is, it’s a common placeholder text that’s used in graphic design and publishing to demonstrate text elements and it is completely nonsensical. Basically, it’s a bunch of Latin gibberish that’s used to indicate where proper copy should go at some point. When it comes to content if it’s not interesting enough to convert a reader, to a prospect or a lead, then it’s not really doing much and it may as well be gibberish, after all, most B2B website’s exist to help convert traffic to leads.

So how can you make sure that your content is engaging enough to convert?

1. Know who you’re writing for. If you don’t have a good idea of who’s going to be reading your content, then how can you possibly ensure that it will be interesting to them? You wouldn’t write the same content for a child as you would for an adult, so why would you try and write the same content for every audience?
2. Be catchy. If your title and initial sentences don’t grab a visitor’s interest immediately, then they’re not going to stick around to convert. 
3. Make sure you’re right. One of the biggest things that discourages a reader’s interaction is reading something that’s riddled with grammatical errors. Not only does this ruin your credibility but it’s also difficult to read and takes more effort to engage with. 
4. Be easily digestible.  Simple is the key idea here. Your content needs to take as little of a commitment as possible to digest. If it’s too much work, your audience won’t commit. 
5. Help them learn more. Using internal links to different areas of your website where your readers can get more information on individual topics is a great way to drive them towards conversion. 
6. Give them a way to convert. If your readers don’t know how to convert, then they won’t. Do you have calls-to-action readily accessible from your content? Do you tell readers that you want them to convert? Do you give them a good reason to?

Posted by Amberlie Denny at March 22, 2011 3:30 PM

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