| On the Internet, content still is king. That is, you may have the best color scheme mingling amongst your background, text, and menus. You might have the best animation, the best font colors, and the best games. You may have the most sophisticated software running on your site, and your site may be so secure, anyone can store their information on it without any worries. However, your site can ring empty if you are not able to fill it up with useful content.
What, in this day and age, is considered useful content? It is content that is short, easy to read, but informative. It may be a few paragraphs of a short article, a research essay that is broken down into simple text, or even a few flowcharts or visual aids for your customers to better understand your processing procedures. Useful content is a way to help your clients go about their daily lives knowing that they know something that can help them get out of emergency situations or tough spots. Useful content is a way to show your customers that you care about them: if you show them that you care enough for them, then they will care enough about what you know.
Your content, however, may have useful information for your website visitors, but if the content is not written professionally, and if you are not authoritative in writing your content, you can turn your website visitors off sooner than you think. In other words, it does not only matter what you know and what help you can provide, it also matters how you say it. You need to speak out about what you know in a voice and tone that people can trust.
You do not need to be dry and humorless, and neither should you be too full of humor. You need to strike the balance between fun and serious, and you need to be engaging. That is, you should be able to both entertain and educate your audience. To which side of the divide between fun and serious should you lean? This will depend on your topic: if you are discussing serious topics and if you have a relatively older audience that you conceive to be more serious, then sprinkle a few jokes here and there, but be largely sober. If you are working with a younger audience and your topics are less serious, keep your tone light and be as fun as you wish.
Moreover, back up your statements with research. You do not have to quote constantly from books, nor do you have to keep on placing citations after every sentence. A few statistics wouldn?t hurt, but avoid confining yourself to percentages (you don?t want to make your website visitors reach for their calculators too often). Instead, quote a few whole numbers, state what this percentage is, and tell your website visitors and web page readers what these numbers mean. In other words, have research to help you out, but the ideas have to be your own.
On the whole, it seems as though you have to know your audience thoroughly, and this indeed the case when you are making website content. You need to know what your audience likes and dislikes, how it behaves, and what it needs. Only then can you write authoritative website content, and only then can your website content be believable enough to propel your website to the top and thereby increase your credibility.
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