There always seems to be confusion about what makes good content for the web. The audience is more fickle, quicker to move on when something doesn’t jump out - but they’re also cunning, knowing when something has misled them.
So what really matters in online content?
Every business is different, but there are patterns to how people read and search on the web. When producing content, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind about your reader:
Why should this bother me? Why should it bother anybody? Maybe it’s because no matter how I look at the statement, ‘Find God’s match for you’ it only serves to anger me. It’s disgusting to play on such corruptible heartstrings as religious bias, and serve it up like an undisputed truth. A perfect happiness like only God could provide! What a pile of crap.
A little shy and very much conscious of the people around the office, my friend whispered “It looks like a uterus.” He shared in the popular consensus that the new Airbnb logo does in fact resemble certain body parts. Genitals in fact; junk, vagina, whatever your mind leaned towards.
“To you marketers, the greatest burden of your generation will be the Old Spice ads.”
This was proclaimed at a lunch and learn some time ago, with some guy I’ve forgotten, but I will remember his words. The brilliant idea propelling sales and reinvigorating the old man brand into a modern essential of the iconic bro culture was a catastrophe because of its success.
It wasn’t a dramatic discovery, but a disappointing one. Seeing a rudimentary debit system in Monopoly to assist kids by removing the almost desperately basic math required.
This has dug under my skin as I see more young workers unable to mentally compute basic change when I order a friggin coffee. Take $3.68 (because coffee is stupidly over priced) from $5.00 and what do you get?
What the hell does cranberry and frost smell like? Or vanilla and moonlight? I’m not interested in how an air freshener borrows from Pocahontas to transport me into a whole new state of being. How does a fragrance, or anything else for that matter deliver on the expectation of altering our physical interpretation of reality? Particularly when I need it to remove dog odour, not promise me a voyage through 'blossom and breeze'.
Bad advertisements. The failure at charisma and transparency; those faked, or at best, sub-par emotional vulnerabilities that trudges into the TV screen to get you to buy out of fear.
Must be a new beauty commercial! Dove is at it again, playing with one of their recent beauty campaigns using fake patches that are supposed to make you pretty. Media blogs pounced like hungry kittens at how the advertisement portrayed women as dumb, I however want to pull out one particular component of the promo.
When I’ve coached customers on building their own content for websites or blogs, there is a very straight forward approach I take. It works with beginner writers who are just trying for the first time, or experienced product experts who are just getting into web writing.