Rather like the SEO principle that good online operations will be optimised precisely because they care AND want relevant traffic – it seems to make sense.

Nothing to Say?

So many businesses fall foul of the main trap in all of this: that they just don’t know what to write. So, here’s a very quick means of helping realise that actually, it isn’t that difficult.

Think Like a Customer

The key is to avoid the first pitfall most will fall into: which is to start thinking about your business.

Don’t spend time on your business, think of your clients and potential clients… consider questions like: what are they interested in? What don’t they know but should? What’s happened recently which could be of interest to them?

Start With Simple Tips / Advice

So, if you get yourselves into the mindset of your customer, the next step is to offer tips and advice. Let’s say, for example, you are a travel agent offering tours of Brittany in France – how about these kinds of tips:

- The best places to eat in the region
- The best beaches
- How to avoid social faux-pas in France
- The climate and best times to travel
- Different ways of getting there (pros and cons)

Perhaps that was too easy? We can probably brainstorm in an hour more titles for pages than could be written in the year.

OK, let’s make it harder. Say you’re an accountant – ‘pretty uninteresting’ you would have thought… but not if you think about the VALUE of accountancy (rather than the process):

- When to incorporate, and when to stay a sole trader (with calculator!)
- How to easily manage the VAT increase (with checklist?)
- Planning for a change in government and the most likely changes to come

Third – Slice and Dice

OK, so let’s say you now have written an article, for example let’s take an article we wrote last year:
“How to Value SEO”

The article contained five general SEO tips… the first one was ‘Getting Analytics Installed on Your Website’.

So, let’s slice and dice, out of this first tip (of five, note), we could write:

- Installing analytics successfully (including why put it in the footer)
- What metrics to look out for
- What metrics to ignore
- How to link it to Adwords / Adsense
- Creating a marketing plan based on Analytics
- How to place a value on your vistors

And, out of the above, let’s say I took the second item ‘What metrics to look out for’, we could then slice up again:

- What to look out for in Visitors
- What to look out for in Traffic Sources
- What to look out for in Content
- Setting up Goals
- Using Intelligience to Your Advantage

So, you can easily see that out of a little bit of strategic thought comes a load of fresh content… from the original article we could come up with at least 100 further articles = a years’ worth of content.

The only problem then is finding the time to write these articles and distribute them. Still, if you like this kind of thinking, then get in touch with Ergo.