03 February 2012

Web Content and Marketing

Uninformative and irrelevant web content only serve to drive the customer away. It's annoying for the reader to have to wait for an upstream ad server to generate and send their content to your site when all they want is what's on your site, the one they're visiting. It catches the customer’s eye and draws their attention to something in which they are not interested. It influences the customer by showing them someone else’s product, not what you are selling or promoting. 

I've come across sites that are almost entirely ad-driven and useless because the site pages have so much code in them to track clicks and repeatedly serve ads. One site I used to use does this and I now simply go to Google to find the same information; it's just easier. Another site is totally inaccessible due to aggressive pop-out ads trying to sell me more of what I already have. Nope, not going there again either. 

What were these two sites selling me? Not their content and services, that’s for sure. Ads relevant to the specific content of the page, one or two of them, at most, are more likely to get the customer’s attention. More than that and the reader is bombarded by irrelevance. 

Another site I visited recently has an attachment to Facebook. It looked to me like I was logged into this site when I was not. How was my Facebook account, which has a “private” setup, relevant to this other site? Not at all. Am I going to that site again, which tried to trick me into using it in such a way? No. Am I likely to use a site that insists I log in via another site’s account? Hardly. The two sites are separate and have no relevance to each other. One does not need to know about the other to be useful. 

If a site is only interested in data about me, and not in what content they can give me, how is that site useful? Not very. It's invasive, if not illegal, to gather information like that, in some places. Collecting visitor data in such an intrusive manner shows the customer that the site is only interested in themselves, not you. Are you, a potentially purchasing customer, relevant to them? No, your money is. That's all. 

So, how do I make my site relevant and informative? You might try reading Shannon Willoby’s relevant and informative article for starters, and find some interesting links elsewhere. When you are done, consider coming back and consulting with me. 

N. P. Maling
© 2012 N. P. Maling – Seattle Book Scouts

Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment