Web Site Content Strategy
Article Site vs Blogs vs Podcasts – Which Works Best For Your Business?
Just when you think you understand the web site content strategy of the day, here comes another one to mess up your plans. If you’re frustrated, confused and don’t know how to fit everything or if you even should. It’s not easy coming up with a web content publishing management strategy. It’s something I struggle with from time to time as well.
I believe it’s a personal choice. All these are just different methods of publishing your content. There are some key questions you might want to consider.
Why are you’re building that site?
How do you envision this site to be, what’s it for? Some sites like product review, launch updates, deal of the day, news and event reporting and FAQ’s are just made for blogs. If you start a site answering “Questions about coaching”. This type of approach is ideal for a blog because there is some kind of interactivity going on and also it’s easy for you to publish your questions and answers. When you have the occasional long form articles, you can always add them to a page on your blog. Your articles and blog need not stand alone, they can be complimentary.
Other sites especially those built for educating and dispensing information would be better off with a regular article based site. While you can use a blog as a content management tool for your articles, a regular website offers much more control when you’re trying to optimize each web page individually. True, you can optimize a blog however, overall I find it’s easier to optimize a website.
Relevance
This is where a good long look at your overall business helps. Some people build sites in all kinds of niches, from gadgets to babies. Others, find their niche and build upon it by creating different sites related to that niche. Example, the main business is coaching. They have one site on coaching FAQ’s, one for coaches, one for life and balance articles for a working mother and so on. If your business is structured like the latter, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to figure out which approach you should go for.
This is because all of these sites are working in tandem to support your main business. It doesn’t matter which you use, in the end, the focus is on your business, you are promoting your services no matter where people go and you’ll reap the rewards. Each of these sites also become a network of content. Doing so also means you could keep only one blog and use it to direct people people to new articles, highlight special articles or alert people about a teleseminar call, kind of like a news hub just for your business. Another nice plus to this is you don’t have to build so many blogs you can’t keep up with.
An example is this page you’re on. Some of you are directed here because I mentioned the article on my blog. Some of you come here from my newsletter. Some from reading the blog’s RSS feed.
When to podcast
Although there are many benefits to podcasting, it can take up an awful lot of time. It’s hard work publishing a show every week or every other week for that matter, it’s almost a business on it’s own. So, make sure you can commit that kind of time before doing so. That doesn’t mean you can’t publish audio your blog when you have an audio to publish.
Many people misunderstand podcasts, they look at it like they see radio and magazine which are totally different things. Fact is, many podcasts are blogs and vice versa.
If you think podcasts are just a little too much to handle right now, here’s one way you can leverage them without committing yourself to it. Become a guest on someone else’s podcast who reaches the same niche as you. Podcast publishers are always looking for great content and people to interview so, fill their need. Why create your own when you can piggy back.
The bottom line
Aim for synergy. If it’s not clear the site should be a blog, I’ll usually start off with a regular articles based website. I think you cannot go wrong with it. It’s the basis of the Internet and will be for a long time just like books are still in publication today, it’s not going anywhere. But ultimately, look at all the different formats as marketing channels. Which ever web site content strategy you choose, they should all ultimately work together to support your main business.
