What kinds of content attract visitors to your website?

Bring visitors to your site like a bee to a flower with great content.
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You’ve heard it preached to you over and over again – not just from us, but from every marketing blog out there. Provide educational content on your site. It’s the #1 way to get visitors to your site. They’re already on Google, asking questions related to your industry, and you know that you can provide the answers. So, you do – or try to, anyway. In your blog. In your resource page. In videos embedded on your site.

For us to say “Provide educational content on your site” is all well and good, but how do know what content your audience is looking for? In other words, what kinds of content attract visitors to your website? There’s so many different kinds of content out there, but even we feel a little stale, a little pigeon-holed at times. If you need inspiration for your content, read on. If you have no idea how to start providing value on your website, read on.

What kinds of content attract visitors to your website?

1. Templates

We’ve had the most success with templates, hands down. We’ve found that visitors might read our blog posts, but they really only want to fill out a landing page if we show that we’ve done the work already and have a product that’s useful and a time-saver. Check out our Educational Content download, for example.

2. How-to

When you can’t remember how to poach an egg, what do you do? You head to your favorite search engine and type “How to poach an egg.” Your customers are doing the same thing in your industry. In ours, our audience is wondering about Facebook ads. So, we wrote about Best Practices for Facebook Ads. They’re wondering about the changes to organic reach on Facebook. So, we wrote about Impending Changes to Your Facebook Strategy.

What would you search if you knew nothing about your company’s industry? Write about that.

3. Hot Topics

I just mentioned the “Impending Changes to Your Facebook Strategy” post. That content falls under the “hot topic” category, too. What’s new and interesting in your industry? What’s controversial? What’s confusing? If you have trouble determining if something really is new and interesting, ask someone on the “outside” – a friend, significant other, your barista. Sometimes, an objective opinion can give more fodder for content than any conversation with your co-workers.

4. Interactive Media

“Interactive media” is a bit vague, but what I mean is this: content presented in a visual, engaging way. For example, videos. Visitors love to watch video, especially if you’re in an industry heavily dependent on the Internet. Videos provide a break from reading blog after blog. Webinars are another good example. Webinars are an event, something to mark on the calendar and clear one’s schedule for. They also provide your audience the chance to interact with you in real time. More examples include podcasts, webcasts, infographics.

The idea is to switch up the norm: provide something new and interesting. It’ll make you stand out from your competition and it’ll keep your visitors coming back to your site.

I have one last tip for you: Never stop exploring. Keep trying out new forms of content, new topics, new ways to present ideas. This list isn’t the end; it’s the tip of the iceberg.