Chunking Website Content

How to Chunk Website Content

Chunking is a method of presenting information into small pieces or ‘chunks’ of information to make reading and understanding faster and easier. Learning how to chunk website content is especially useful for material presented on websites because readers tend to scan pages first before they decide to read the full page.

Humans have an attention span of about 5 seconds, so they usually make a decision whether to read a page within 5 to 8 seconds.

Information is conveyed more quickly, allowing readers to find what they need more efficiently.

Chunked content usually contains:

A strong keyword-rich headline. (Bonus points if it also contains a benefit to reading the page.)
A short introductory paragraph of only 2-3 sentences. (For SEO, you should use the Focus Keyword for the piece in the first paragraph)
Bullet lists that convey information quickly. Benefits of your product or service work well. (Features tell, benefits sell.)
Keyword-rich and benefit-rich sub-headlines.
Short paragraphs that convey one idea per paragraph. (Even 1-sentence paragraphs)
Graphics. They break up a page for easier reading, but graphics can convey emotions and ‘a picture is worth 1,000 words.’

Speaking of graphics, consider Pinnable graphics that people will curate using Pinterest. You may want to use the Pinterest plugin on your site. Infographics are also very popular and Pinnable!

The Bite, Snack & Meal Method

Leslie O’Flahavan came up with the concept of chunking content in a specific way around the turn of the century. She taught the method by describing site visitors as ‘nibblers’ or those ready to dive right in. The method was described in a 2001 article in Inc magazine. Continue reading →

How to Find Your Perfect Audience

How to Create Target Personas

This post is a followup to Writing Content for a Website. In this post, we are going to cover a very new and counter-intuitive way to find your perfect audience using surveys.

Content can also be used to rank higher in Google, Bing and Yahoo. For more on that, click here. The strategies of attracting people to your website and converting them are vastly different, but important.

You wouldn’t try to sell air-conditioners to eskimos, would you? It would not be as big a market as selling air-conditioning to residents of the United States or Central America. Conversley, you’ll sell more mukluks north of the Canadian border than you will south of the Mexican border.

You need to understand your perfect audience’s needs so that you can create content that will appeal to them. You will also use this information to effectively market to them!

There are almost always more than one target persona, marketing persona or avatar! To keep them straight, we often name them.

Think of your avatars as sketches or dossiers of your ideal prospects that show you how to find your perfect audience.

They would certainly include their primary and secondary challenges and the solutions you can offer them. There might be information about his or her job title or role. You might include demographic information, such as age (narrow or broad), gender, occupation, salary, location, education, values, personal interests, politics, religious affiliations, media consumed, etc. Anything that helps describe your perfect audiences, their needs and what differentiates them form each other.

There is almost always something you can learn about them to ultimately increase your conversions. (And your site traffic. More on that another day.)

“Understanding who your Target Personas are and what solutions they are looking for is a mandatory requirement for Website Success.”

Continue reading →

Writing Content for a Website

The Biggest Obstacle to Building a Website

In 20 years of building websites for clients large and small, we always tried to refine our process to make website development as easy and effective as possible. To do it right, website owners need to understand their target personas (audience), their needs, their competitors, the resources they have to invest, the technology they’ll use to build engagement or sell their products or services, the hosting…the list goes on an on.

One thing is for sure, the biggest obstacle to building a website is writing content for a website. That includes not only page content, but blog posts and product descriptions. It might include scripts for audio or visual content and it definitely includes photos, icons or other images that help the visitor decide that they have found the solution they are looking for.

Website content creation begins with a well thought out site hierarchy.

Keys to Website Success

There are many keys to a successful website, but the two most important keys to website success are getting visitors (traffic) to the site and converting those visitors to buyers. We are focusing on website conversion today, and will have followup posts on related topics over the next several days!