How much time do you spend creating content for your online business presence?
Whether you’re building an effective website, managing a blog or giving away insider information through your social media accounts, one thing remains common. It’s a lot of hard work to keep new content flowing.
With all that effort, it’s important that you get the most out of your materials. Using that info over again in inventive ways will get you the biggest return-on-investment.
Downloadable Content
In an industry, there are a number of things that your audience and customers want to know. Here’s a few of the best examples of content that easily converts to a downloadable content version:
Informational Blog Posts and How-To’s
As we’ve told you before giving away useful industry information brings visitors to your site and establishes trust with potential customers. Blog posts and how-to documents can be recrafted into effective download items.
The best practice is to build your site content and then rewrite the same information into a brief or concise version that fits on one page if possible. Adding this new document to the web page where the original content exists give site visitors the option to save or print this crucial data for when they really need it.
Schedules and Event Calendars
Keeping your audience in-the-know is important. We’ve recommended on several occasions that posting your business schedule, special events and trade show attendance to your website is a great practice.
A lot of people like to put their special dates and reminders on the fridge of wall calendar, regardless of how many electronic reminders there are. Make schedules downloadable.
Product and Service Details
Sometimes information can only be found in download form. Specifications and product details are a great example. Casual observers or Internet window shoppers don’t want or need every little bit of info on a specific product or service, they merely want the broad strokes. Too much info right off the bat can turn buyers off but a lack of details is also a mistake.
Make sure your advance details and product specs can be found easily by those who want them. In most cases a person trying to view detailed specs is much closer to a purchase or conversion than the latter. Give them what they need to close the deal.
Special Documents Capture Contact Details
If you think your customers will give you this information, set up an email capture system to accompany your downloads. You’ve likely seen this type of marketing before.
Once a document is chosen for download the user is prompted to fill in a few contact fields in order to access the download. They get free downloadable content and your business captures another viable email for trickle marketing purposes.
Pretty much any content you create can be turned into some sort of takeaway for your online customers. The most useful and shared documents are ones that solve a problem. Solving problems for your customers is a great way to encourage sales.
Check out some of our recent blog posts to help your small business get noticed:
Generating Ideas: How-To Write Your Own Blog
Website Needs Analysis: A How-To
How To Keep Them Clicking: Reducing Bounce Rate
