Spice Girls #04

The power of relevant and useful content is still King of online marketing strategy. The absence of quality content will put all well-executed strategies to waste. Perfect link building, beautiful web layout, powerful keywords-all would be pointless if your content is filled with nonsense. If only for this reason, content should be the focus of every internet marketer, web developer and SEO practitioner.

Your content should be relevant to your website and your company's niche market. Your website is the online representation of your business, and what appears in it should be significant to the product or service you are selling.

Many web owners take content for granted. Many count on powerful and well-researched keywords from Google AdSense and other existing keyword tools on the Web to capture and keep their readers' attention. They tend to forget that keywords are meant merely to catch the attention of search engines (so the blog or site gets indexed and crawled) and SEO processes. By themselves, keywords can't keep a reader on your site, or keep him coming back, for that matter. Only quality content can do that. If you're still stuck on the concept of having your blog or website read like the ad section of a newspaper-with every word designed to sell, promote and advertise your business-you're bound to lose out in the long run.

The flamboyant singing sensation-the Spice Girls-were absolutely right when they sang: Too much of something is bad enough. It's true that too much outright selling (in other words, a hard sell) on your web page or blog will turn customers off and possibly drive them away for good. Unless they find something new, interesting, and of true value to them on your page-such as expert advice, helpful tips, or a unique take on a current issue or product-readers are bound to look elsewhere for what they need.

Readers browse the Web to learn and gain something new; therefore, you should seek to educate your readers. If you are a girl-pop memorabilia seller on the Web, don't just feed them with information about the memorabilia you are selling, educate them about the whole pop industry. Introduce your audience to the lives and works of Madonna, The Roxies, The Runaways, Stevie Nicks, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and the Spice Girls; focus your efforts on providing value and not on promoting your business. Subtly entice them through your stories; you can create a need for your products by introducing interesting new things about your niche instead of blatantly promoting and advertising your products or services. Establish yourself as a reliable source of information-as if you were the Wikipedia and or Encyclopedia Britannica of your niche. Just tell the stories and let these stories do the selling for you.