Any speaker who warns his audience that his presentation “will employ satire” is off to a good start. He definitely had my attention. The speaker was Cliff Seal, a user experience designer who’s session on content was my favorite at WordCamp Miami.
His comments on why content is important and how your audience sees content offers some good information for site owners. Asa Shatkin of Shebang Design also offered eye-opening information in a session on inbound marketing. Here are a few highlights from both:
Content
- “People know that most web pages are useless and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than necessary on bad pages….” Jakob Nielson
- “To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.” Jakob Nielson
- “94% of users dismissed a site based purely on design.” (From a study of health sites)
- Say what you mean quickly.
- Be honest and figure out why anyone would care.
- Use your ignorance about your audience to learn more.
Inbound Marketing
I usually try to explain to clients how they’ll benefit from updated content on their blog and in social networks. But I think next time I’ll just point them to this post and the words of Asa Shatkin….
- Blog frequently. B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads per month than those that don’t.
- An average company will see 45% growth in traffic if they increase blog posts from 11-20 per month to 21-50.
- Build your website with content. Companies with 50 to 100 pages get 48% more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages.
- Build your social networks. Companies with 51-100 Twitter followers get 88% more traffic than those with 25 or fewer.
- On Facebook, the average company sees 185% boost in traffic after receiving 1,000 likes or fans.
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