If You Don’t Give a Rat’s Ass About Your Site’s Content, No One Else Will Either

Your website sucks.

I guarantee it, your website sucks.

How do I know this? Because everybody who sets up a website falls into the same trap. They spend hours agonizing over color palettes and pictures and things that zoom across the screen and videos and links to cats bumping into sliding glass doors, and then when the time comes to plug in some copy, they write “Welcome to our website!” Which is tremendous, because it’s still 1995 and if nobody picks up the landline while your modem’s connected, you can log in to a Prodigy chat and discuss the OJ Simpson trial.

“But I have no idea what to write!” you whine. Well first, shut up, and then ask yourself why you set up your website in the first place. If you’re selling knockoff Rolexes or Viagra on the cheap, then naturally your website sucks, but that’s because it’s expected to suck. It’s just stuffed with keywords to try and part fools from their money. But if your website is legit, you have no excuse for not having something to write about.

If you’ve set up a site to sell, let’s say, high-tech banana slicers, then I expect that you’re something of an expert in the banana slicer space. Otherwise, why would you be selling banana slicers? And if you’re an expert in the space, then you should have passion. You should have passion when it comes to banana slicers. So then why would you start off with “Welcome to our website!”? Is that how you’d try to sell banana slicers in the real world? Does that convey passion? No. It smacks of laziness.

Consider this. If you made the slightest modification to that opening line, changed it to “Welcome to our banana slicer website!” you’ve already improved your site a hundredfold. Now if someone stumbles upon your site, at the very least they know what it is you’re selling. And the search engines now have some clue what to do with you.

But your website still sucks.

Here’s the thing – if you don’t like to write or you don’t have a flair for writing, then spend the money and find someone who can write really good copy for your website. Yes, it’s an upfront investment, and yes, there’s someone who doesn’t share your passion for banana slicers who is now writing about them, but believe me, it’s worth it. The often-repeated phrase “content is king” is not empty rhetoric. If you’re going to get anywhere in the online world – banana slicers or no – you’re going to need solid, quality content on your site, and you’re going to need to keep it up-to-date and fresh. Do that, and you’ve got a shot. Fail to do it, and you’ll be stuck with a warehouse full of banana slicers.

And no one wants that.

Photo credit: ccarlstead / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND