tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Karen

perception is reality, press releases, site content

winter sea

So it would seem that the picture really is worth 1,000 words – and if it’s a cute one, then even better! My last picture post brought the most visits so far to my blog, which was very interesting and great illustration of my point about the power of images!

So I figured that this time I should include an image too – this one is from Takamatua, a bay on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand, about an hour’s drive from where I live. And yes, it has been coloured – there wasn’t really a marmalade sky.

And the point of this post? It’s all about perception.

Marketing people will tell you over and over again, “perception is reality” … so no matter what the actual reality is, that doesn’t matter … what matters is what people perceive that reality to be.

How does this affect your web content?

Well it’s all good for you if you have a new site and need to quickly build brand credibility, reputation etc. Because it is possible on the web to immediately present your business as an established organisation – or equally, you as someone with an existing reputation.

Look at the sites of the leading players in your market segment, and pay attention to the cues that indicate they are established and credible. These might be things like case studies and customer testimonials; a significant number of stories or press releases in their News pages; a company profile that shows more than one person in the team – and gives some history to the business; a number of newsletters archived on the newsletter section; significant number of blog posts etc.

Now you might not be able to produce all of that overnight, but you can start to build up some material that will all go up on the site at once, but possibly with a variety of dates.

For example, you may have launched your business last year, but not got round to creating a web presence until 12 months later. At the time you started the business, you may not have put out any press releases – perhaps because you didn’t know how, or you didn’t think what you were doing was particularly newsworthy at the time. Or, you simply wanted to put a toe in the water before you started making a lot of noise about your business.

No matter what the reason, you can create a press release – that is purely for your site, which is dated from the time you launched your business. Then create additional releases for significant moments in the next 12 month period – so when your new website goes live, you have three or four releases up there, all dated chronologically.

The great thing about this approach is that you don’t have to worry about pitching these releases to your target media, you can write them specifically for your audience. Which means you can provide a more specialised type of information – designed for your audience, rather than the broader brush approach you would take for business media.

You can also optimise these releases for your target keywords, and incorporate links to other parts of your site, and to your sales conversion path, so they provide a great opportunity to improve your rankings and direct people into the most important parts of your website.

If you are not certain or confident about writing good press releases, there are plenty of online resources that will give you tips, like this for writing perfect press releases and this http://www.press-release-writing.com/newsletters/

So filling up your News page is a start to making your site look established and substantial - make sure it is rich with content, even if you have to create it retrospectively.

If you have a blog on your site, have at least five posts up in there before you reveal it to the world. Again, you can date them in sequence, so they give the impression you have been blogging for a while.

I think that’s enough for you to digest now – another post on building credibility further through your site content will follow soon.

à bientôt

Karen