Creating digital content for your website (3 methods)
Build it and they will come …., not quite. Not at all, actually. Once your website is designed and published, that's not the end of that. You need to ensure that you now have the relevant traffic finding, and coming to your website. For that, you’re going to need to keep up the work. What we mean by that is creating content for your audience. Valuable content (useful information) which serves your ideal clients and customers, so that they can be well informed about your work, your industry, and more importantly, how they can better their own businesses and lives.
Creating digital content to attract more people to your website, is the next step.
3 Methods of creating digital content
The following are 3 great ways of creating your online content, to start bringing in more traffic to your site. The type of content you want to create really does depend on what you’re passionate about.
Is it writing?
Is it filming videos (e.g. tutorials), or filming yourself talking to the camera about a certain topic?
Or, you love talking but just not to the camera so much?
Let’s run through 3 really effective methods, and you can choose for yourself which one suits you best. For all of the following methods, you want to create content which is evergreen! This is information which is going to be relevant to your ideal client, 5 to (even) 10 years from now.
Blog posts
This is one of the best ways to create valuable content, as well as optimizing your website with keywords which will really help your Google ranking.
Blog posts are great pieces of copy, which when written with good SEO (search engine optimisation) in mind, can also increase your website traffic overtime. The benefit is two-fold!
Blog posts are SUPER easy to create and publish on Squarespace websites. They should be between 500 (absolute minimum) - 2000 words in length to help with your search engine ranking!
One of the best things about a blog is that although you may have to spend some time initially writing them, but once they’re published on your site, you can leave it there and let it do the work for you, for months to come.
We have blog posts which we wrote over 2 years ago, and they’re still bringing in 80% of our organic website traffic!
Learn how to properly optimise your blog posts, you may be interested in the following article too > 7 Squarespace blogging tips
Haven’t got time to write weekly blog posts from scratch?! Take a look at our other blog post for some EPIC online resources you can start using today > 4 Online tools to help you create compelling content for your business
YouTube videos
YouTube is another fantastic online resource, which can continue to serve your business for many years to come.
This is a top choice for tutorial type content. For example, teaching your audience a specific skill by screen sharing, or speaking directly to the camera (if you’re comfortable with that type of thing). People like videos. In fact, many people prefer watching a video to reading a 1000 word blog post. And if you’re up to it, you can give your visitors the choice.
YouTube can also be another traffic source to your website and business.
You really don’t need an expensive camera and professional equipment to get started. If you have a smartphone with a working camera, you can get going immediately! We’ve found that it is definitely worth investing in good audio though. Get yourself a good mic, it doesn’t have to be expensive, and good audio will go a long way for your viewers.
It’s also shown that videos are great for website SEO, because you can embed your videos on your site via blog posts (yep that’s right)! Why are they great for SEO? It’s been found that because visitors may stick around for longer on your site watching your video, Google and other search engines recognise this as a good thing! Hence improving your Google ranking. Squarespace gives you a couple of options when it comes to posting videos onto your site. You can share YouTube video links (and these will appear as actual YouTube videos), but you can also now upload native video files (which has the benefit of no ‘YouTube’ branding).
Now, it truly depends on whether you want to grow your YouTube channel simultaneously. If this is the case, then be sure to share the actual links to your YouTube videos. Because when people watch the YouTube videos on your website, this contributes to your video views on your channel.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a long-form, audio form of content that can be more casual and easy to produce than other types of video.
There's no need for expensive equipment or to ‘get ready for the camera’ because you're not filming anything - just recording audio! This makes podcasts perfect if your business needs an engaging content platform without the hassle of producing high quality videos on YouTube every week.
Similar to YouTube videos, we would strongly suggest posting your podcast within blog posts on your Squarespace website too! What’s the benefit of this? Once your visitors head to your site, they’ll have access to all of your podcast content via your blog. It gives your audience quick access to the valuable content you’re creating. This also has a second benefit because it helps with your site’s SEO, again, similar to videos.
There is another option with this type of content, you can also create video podcasts! This enables you to produce a video AND audio content at the same time. Talk about efficiency! We’ve done exactly this on our own YouTube channel > check it out here!
Benefits of content creation
Content is free
The content you create for your audience is free and therefore much more financially beneficial for you as the creator, as opposed to paid ads.
Content is evergreen
This content is going to be available for your audience for many years to come. It is also going to be relevant to your site’s visitors for many years to come.
Paid ads aren’t evergreen and have an expiry date. The initial work you had to put in eventually expires.
Content gives you authority
By creating free content that people can engage with first on their own, you are able to build up a relationship of trust. This way when they come in contact for a real-time sales conversation it'll feel more natural and less intimidating because there's already some familiarity from reading your blog post, watching your videos or listening to your podcasts, before making an actual purchase!