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How to Use Content to Attract New Customers and Engage with Your Audience

As a website owner, you know that content is king. But what you may not know is how to manage your website’s content in a way that is both effective and efficient. In this article, we will discuss the pain points that website owners often face when it comes to content management and how to solve them.

“I just don’t have the time!”

One of the biggest pain points is simply finding the time to create and manage content. Between running your business and taking care of other responsibilities, it can be hard to find the time to sit down and write blog posts, create social media content, and more.

If you’re struggling to find time to manage your website’s content, there are a few things you can do. First, try to batch your work. This means setting aside specific times each week or month to work on content creation and management. This will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed and will help you get more done in less time.

You can also try to automate some of your content management tasks. There are a number of tools available that can help you with this, such as social media scheduling tools and content management systems. By automating some of your tasks, you’ll free up more time to focus on other things.

“I don’t know what to write about!”

Another pain point that website owners often face is not knowing what content to create. It can be tough to come up with new and interesting ideas that will engage your audience. If you’re struggling to come up with content ideas, there are a few things you can do. First, take some time to research your audience. What are they interested in? What are their pain points? Once you know what your audience is interested in, you can start to create content that will appeal to them.

You can also look at what other websites in your industry are doing. What kind of content are they creating? What seems to be resonating with their audience? You can use this information to get ideas for your own content.

Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment. Try different types of content and see what works best for you and your audience. You may be surprised at what you find.

“Nobody reads what I write!”

Once you’ve created your content, you need to make sure it’s being seen by your audience. This means promoting your content on social media, in email newsletters, and other channels.

If you’re struggling to promote your content, there are a few things you can do. First, make sure your content is high quality. If your content is not interesting or engaging, people are not going to share it. You can also try to promote your content through paid advertising. This can be a great way to reach a larger audience quickly. However, it’s important to make sure you’re targeting your ads correctly so that you’re not wasting money. Finally, don’t forget to use social media to promote your content. Share your content on your social media pages and encourage your followers to share it as well.

Managing your website’s content can be a challenge, but it’s important to remember that it’s an investment in your business. By creating and managing high-quality content, you can attract new customers, engage with your audience, and build your brand. By following the tips in this article, you can manage your website’s content like a pro.

Get in touch to find out how our WordPress Design System can make managing your content easier than ever before.

Image Size Matters – Reducing the load time of your pages

Karin from ScreamBlueMurder has done a great job of writing up a conversation we had about image sizes on web pages. She quite rightly pointed out that although we optimise all the initial content when we build a website, the customer usually has the ability to add their own content after the launch, and may not be aware of the impact of uploading unoptimised images to their site.

I have added some of my thoughts below, but I recommend reading Karin’s article first: Better Browsing: Image Size Matters!

a pie chart showing images as the main portion of page requests
Typically, images make up the largest portion of a web page.

One of the most important things to remember when trying to reduce image file size is to use the appropriate file type for the image:

  • .png for line art, logos etc (basically anything that looks like a vector).
  • .jpg for photos and everything else.

As Karin mentions, you should use Irfanview (Windows) or ImageOptim (Mac) to optimise images before posting on the web. Both offer the option to do this in batches.

Recommended JPG settings are:

  • Remove EXIF metadata (photographers reading this are shouting “NO!” at their screen right now, but to most people, this would be a huge benefit).
  • Set quality to 80.
  • Save as ‘Progressive JPG‘ (this enables the image to gradually get more detailed as it downloads, rather than having to wait until the whole file is received before it can be displayed).
  • PNGs should be saved with compression set to at least 6.

This is just a guide, you may be able to set the quality even lower, but some images may show artefacts and have to be set a little higher at 85/90. Experiment to see what works for different images.

Optimising your images is the easiest step to huge gains in reducing page load times, which can have a direct impact on company profits.

Contact us – we would be happy to provide you with a comprehensive review of your website’s performance including actionable steps to make it faster.

Block referrer spam from the SEMalt botnet

We are trialling the following solution for blocking what is fast becoming a scourge of the web; SEMalt referrer spam.
It’s been added to the .htaccess file on one of our personal sites, and we’ll see how it does there before implementing these measures on the rest of the sites we manage. Update to follow.

UPDATE: While blocking at the server IS working, there is much more to blocking this type of spam which is detailed here and here.