How to Create More Content for Your Products

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How do I write about my products? I have built a lot of different sites for a lot of different people and this question always comes up. I’m not quite sure why. Some of these people had had brick and mortar stores for years But somehow when it comes to writing about their products, they draw a blank.
And I can understand that. Most people don’t like to write. And if that’s the issue, I can understand that. But don’t tell me you don’t have anything to say about your product.
The best salesman know everything there is to know about the product they are selling. It is no different on the Internet. In fact, maybe even a bit easier to show all the knowledge you have of your products on the Internet. Most hosting providers will give you a virtually unlimited amount of storage. Use it. Use it to build content around your products.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s a product you manufacture, sell retail or sell as an affiliate. Those with the most information (backed with the right promotions) will win the prize. And yes, I did list affiliates, because there are a lot of companies out there that will create a product and just forget about it because they know there is an army of affiliates waiting to promote that product. Be an army of one. by not stopping with the information your vendor gives you.
And before you start writing content, remember this: you know a lot more than who you are writing for. That seems like a simple statement, but you have to consistently remind yourself this. I did not know how new newbies could be until I helped someone with their first WordPress installation. A sentence for an intermediate WordPress user can translate into a thesis for a newbie.
What Type of Content?
First there is the product itself. What can you say about it? What color is the? What sizes it? Does it have any distinctive markings on it? What does it look like? If you had to identify it with the police sketch artist could you? I’m not asking these questions to be silly. I am asking them from experience. You’d be amazed at what people type into the search box. If you can answer that question, then your report is traffic.
What are the features of the product? We’ve all heard about features and benefits. The features are basically what a product does. And the benefits list how you benefit from the product. You’ve probably heard that you should focus on the benefits, but we are not just in the advertising field, we are also in the search engine field. A benefit may get someone to buy, but people search for features. When I want to make sure the gaps under my doors aren’t letting in cold air, I don’t search for “lower heating bills”. I search for “seal gap under door”.
But keep benefits in mind also. Benefits are for selling to people that aren’t in the market or at least, don’t think they are. The person on a mission will search for “seal gap under door”, but the person just browsing will need to be thrown the hint “lowers heating bills” which will jog his memory about last month’s bill. And if you have a lot of products that fulfill that benefit, you’re in luck. Benefits are more general and content is easier to find and create.
Tutorials are another way to expand the content you have available with a product. Again, it doesn’t matter if the product is your own or you are just an affiliate. A lot of affiliates have cleaned up by creating a bigger resource for the product they are selling than the vendor themselves. How do you use the product normally? What are some unconventional uses? What are some really unconventional uses? How do you do one very specific thing with the software? How do you do another? And another? Be clear and write good step by step instructions.
Written text is one form of content. We also have pictures, pictures you may need for the tutorials above. It is best to give these files a keyword based file name to help with your ranking. It may also help to host your images on a social image site like Flickr to get a bit more extra traffic. Then just add the flickr code to your posts or your pages.
Videos are another form of content that can help. Creating videos of you using or installing the product you sell. And make sure that you don’t just host the video on your site. Spread it as far you can by uploading it to every video site you can find.
Put a contact form on your site and beg for questions. Then answer them with posts when it makes sense to do so. If no one is asking questions, go to forums and answer sites and answer them there. Then go back to your site and write a more detailed answer.
Where to Put Your Content
Your site is a good start. But it is not the end.
You noticed that I said to host your pictures and videos on a social site if you can. This was not just to save you storage space. These sites have communities, huge communities.
There are also social networks, article directories and forums out there. On the internet, you have to think about potential. There are potential customers on these sites who will never find your site unless you make it visible to them. But here is not the place to sell. Here is the place to write anything related to your products that will set you up as an expert in your field or niche.
No product descriptions. No sales pages. No features. Show your knowledge of a product by covering it’s niche. If you sell computers, write about how to install a video card. If you sell blog themes, write about css
Content ideas are everywhere, you just have to look. And if you listen, potential customers will give you the best content ideas. But don’t be greedy and keep all of your content on site. The benefits of spreading your content around to various social sites and networks are massive. Now get to work. You have a lot of content to create.




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Some great info. Having thoughts of writing language guide book this year. Will come visit her more often.
Putting your content on your site and in social network sites is a great idea – but if you decide to put your content on social networks you should do one of the 2 for SEO reasons:
1 – verify that your content is indexed in Google index before distributing it elsewhere.
2 – write completely different content for social networks.
Thanks for the tips. I should have mentioned that in the post.
Three are lots of things you can do for content:
tutorials, white papers, testimonials, reviews, press clippings, how tos, customer education and much, much more.
Thanks for those other suggestions. There is so much content you can build for just about anything.
Hey bro
What’s new? I recently got a new macbook and wanted to know if you had or knew of any helpful resources to help me move from PC to Mac- something to make life easier. Sorry I’m off topic here but if there’s anyone that knows, I thought this person might be you.
Thanks!
-Mig
I probably couldn’t switch to a Mac until more software was available or most of the time I would be running Windows out of BootCamp.
But here are a few resources I have found:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1408
http://www.detto.com/mac-file-transfer.html
There also might be the option of installing Windows alongside OSX using VMware or Parallels, but I have had issues with both of those programs. Not really that user friendly yet and I had to jump through hoops just to get a printer to work.
wow, yeah… jumping through hoops is not always fun.
Thanks for sharing the links. It’s all coming along well. Thanks again.
-Mig
Nice post. Have you thought about this problem: You put your content online. Before google has indexed your content, someone already has stolen it and put it in his own website and google has indexed his site first. So its double content and you are not author – in googles eyes.
any thought?
There is lots of useful stuf here.
With regards people who run bricks and mortar stores, the marketing tends to be much more visual and is focused on putting ads in places they think that their customers will see it. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Just look at bill boards, magazine ads and so on. The image is often what catches the eye and then the text is read as a result.
Marketing for web sites is different in as much as you dont go and find the customers is the same way. Its more about making sure the customers find you. Getting good search results for an image is a tough one so the written word becomes more important.
I guess it just takes time for people to change mind set
Hi,
Nice blog and thanks for information awesome
You’ll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer’s affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.
RE: comment 9- about google indexing the scraped content first…if you’re a blog or blog-type site, definitely ping google, so it will register you first.
How true this is Stephan: “A lot of affiliates have cleaned up by creating a bigger resource for the product”.
Take something like an ipod for example, a very difficult product to market. It’s one of the most over advertised items on the internet and yet many affiliates try their best to ad to the mix.
Apple has their cookie cutter product description for this item, but if an affiliate writes a product description that remains unique, (accurately of course) they increase the chance of an ad page ranking higher. (simply out of uniqueness)
Of course we can’t forget the blog comments that may ad to the marketing effort.
Thanks Stephan, great information here!
It’s also how the ecommerce sites I run have got to where they are. We show up in Google images and in Google because sometimes we are the only ones that has that specific information online. We wrote our content and product descriptions where we had time and the rest are not online anywhere in the mass quantities we have.
Some good advise. Content is king, but nevertheless quality is even more important. Only good content helps you rank for google.
A really great post! I’ve been thinking of posting on this topic on my blog, Fiercely Strategic. When I do, I’ll definitely have to provide a link to this thorough write-up.
Good post. Writing e-commerce content is tough.
Yes it is. Because you have to know what you are talking about, so with a new site, it takes a lot of research.
Great article. I work part-time for a company that is largely offline, but they have a website. I’m trying to get them to incorporate a blog section on their site so they can actually have some content besides a company information page. I think I’ll show them this article because it makes such a good case for having content to support your products. Thanks!
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Written text with a mixture of pictures seems to be the easiest way to add content for your products. Heck, you can pay someone to write the content if you are not a good writer.
This looks like a cool blog. Its always good to see well put together blogs that provide good articles and info on marketing and such like, and as online marketing is so competitive , we need all the help we can get. Thanks for all you do
Yes i have had “someone stealing” my contents before google index’s it. I am not sure how to stop them though. Any thoughts?
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