We’re still planning a website! In this episode, I’ll talk about creating a list of the content you need for your website. You don’t need to go very in-depth for now, but you do need to know what types of content you’ll have to decide about other aspects of your website, so it’s essential to understand what you need.
Transcript
Welcome! In this episode, we’re going to talk about creating a list of content ideas for your website. You shouldn’t go very in-depth for this list; it’s really just a way for you to start to think about the types of content and information you’ll need for your website so you have that for planning purposes. You’ll get much more in-depth when you start to actually work on your content during the Create Content phase of the Website Success Path. By the way, I do have a Content Planner that can help you with that, and you can get it at websitesuccessacademy.com, but I want you to complete the Website Planner before you start that.
So, back to your content ideas. To brainstorm your content, you’ll need three things:
- The goals for your website. If you’re using my website planner, you already documented those, so check that off your list.
- Your target audience. Again, you already documented that in the website planner.
- Your competitors. Would you look at that? You already have that information in your website planner.
Now you need to come up with ideas for the content that your target audience needs from your website to reach your goals. Simple, right? So how do you do it?
The best way to figure out the content you need is by asking your target audience. Add questions about this to a survey, and send it out to the same people you surveyed when you created your ideal client avatar. Ask them about the types of information they look for when they go to a website. What type of content is important for them? What information do they need to determine if they’re going to spend money or otherwise work with someone? You can even ask them specific questions related to your goals? For example, if your goal is to “schedule 5 sales calls this month,” you can ask: “What information do you need about a business before you will schedule a sales call?”
Another way to figure out what types of content you need is by looking at your competitors’ websites. What information do they share on their website? Will that information help you reach your goals? Will it help your target audience? If the answer to both of those is “yes,” add that content to your list.
Yet another way to do this is to ask an AI tool what content you should add to your website. It will be happy to tell you. For example, if I ask Google Bard “What content should I have on a website for an afterschool STEM program?” it will tell me I should have a homepage with a brief overview of my program, as well as a call to action to learn more. It also tells me I can also include testimonials from past participants, as well as a link to my blog. Bard also lists pages I can have on the website like:
- About
- Programs
- Curriculum
- Faculty
- Testimonials
- Contact
It even goes into some details about what I should include on each of those pages.
When you list your content ideas, you can organize them in whatever way makes the most sense to you. I usually organize it by the pages I think I’ll have for the website. That means I will list all of the pages I think I’ll need for my website along with a description of the content I’ll have on each page.
After you do some research, take a moment to document your ideas. If you’re using my Website Planner, which you can get at websitesuccessacademy.com, you’ll just use the List Your Content Ideas page to do this. Otherwise you can add the list to whatever you’re using to document your planning for your website.
I hope you found this information helpful. I’ll see you in the next episode.