If you want your website to be valuable to your customers and generate a consistent stream of good leads for your business what do you need to focus on? Here are the eight most important elements you’ll need to address with your content and web design if you want your website to fulfil its potential.

1. Focus on your target reader first

If you want to create a website that genuinely works for your business, put the customer first. This means defining exactly who the website is for, building a deep understanding of what their needs are and designing the site and its content around those needs. Just describing your company, what you do, the services you deliver is not enough. You will miss the mark with your customers and miss an important trick with your marketing if you do this. Remember: your website is not for you, it’s for your customers.

2. Content matters

Some mistakenly see a website’s content purely as filler. Bung a few words down to replace all that Lorem Ipsum your designer first put in. Nobody reads it anyway do they? But the content is vital: your words ARE your message. That’s how you communicate your value and get your point across. Don’t begin the design process until you have the content. So think content first, then get the web designers in.

3. Valuable content matters most of all

We see many sites without a shred of valuable content, and some with the right type of content but it’s virtually hidden from sight. Both are missing a trick. Remember: valuable content is what your buyers seek so make your content USEFUL. Think library, not brochure with useful articles, video, slideshows. Fill those shelves over time.

“If your website isn’t getting traffic it’s because your content isn’t important or useful enough. It’s that simple. You’re not raising the bar, helping people, entertaining them, changing lives, and inspiring your readers to take some form of action. If you were, your audience would grow. Trust me.”  Mars Dorian, creative entrepreneur.

4. Good design is essential

Investing in professional design is crucial if you want to give a professional image, entice people to stay on the site, read what you have to say and find the information they want to find, fast. Skimp on good design at your peril. There’s nothing more off putting than a badly designed or confusingly laid out site with content that is hard to read.

5. Make your website simple to navigate

Make it simple for your visitors to find the information they want, fast or they’ll quickly get frustrated and click away. Can they get from A to B? Pay attention to the site’s ‘information architecture’, and make sure it’s structured around your visitors’ different needs. This takes thought and planning. Remember to follow conventions – don’t try and reinvent the wheel.

6. Your content must be scannable

Write it, design it for the busy reader. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen when asked how users read on the web, replied simply: “They don’t.”

“People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.” Jakob Nielsen’s Alerttbox, Oct 1 1997

New visitors will make fast judgements about your site. They will scan first and read only if they can see that it is relevant. If you want to connect with them, get to the point fast. Summarise, use numbered or bulleted lists, highlight key words or phrases, use sub-headings to guide them through the page. And slash that word count. Even more important now we’re reading web content on mobile devices.

6. Learn to label for search engines

Search engine algorithms are getting better and better but if you don’t label your information properly then they will struggle to index your stuff. If you’re going to get the most from your investment in great content, learn how to index it properly so that the Googlebots can can find it. That is, in a nutshell, what search engine optimisation is all about – no black art – in essence it’s about good labelling. Make like a good librarian and index your stuff appropriately.

7. Make your website sticky

The longer your visitors stays on the site, the higher their level of engagement and the more chance you have of starting to build that relationship, get them to sign up, contact you, buy your stuff. So you have to make your website ‘sticky’. Fill it full of information they genuinely value. Link and direct them to related content: “If you like this, you might also be interested in this.” And give them an opportunity to come back: invite them to join your mailing list and, if you continue to deliver them value, you’ll motivate them to come back to your site to learn more.

8. Clear calls to action

We don’t mean just putting your contact details on the Contact Us page. We mean having clear signposts to action across the site – telling your visitor what you want them to DO if they like what they find. So many sites miss out on this. Retailers tend to be better at it – ADD TO BASKET, BUY NOW. For service firms – the purpose of the site is to engage your visitors, to build the relationship, not always to elicit an immediate purchase. The action you want is for visitors to either get in contact with you or give you permission to stay in touch (sign up to your mailing list). Give clear calls to action and spell out the next step you want the reader to take. Make it easy for them.

Build your website around these eight elements and you’ll reap the rewards in terms of visitors, leads and sales in 2012.

Related articles:

• How to create a lead generating, high performance website
• Pack your website full of value

The signposts your clients seek

I’m doing some research for a new project – writing landing pages for a Pay Per Click web campaign – and I’ve been assessing my client’s competition. The pages are for a legal firm, so it’s a very crowded market, yet one firm keep coming up top, again and again. And the thing that’s keeping them there is a very simple piece of valuable content.

This firm has created a very straightforward and well written pdf document that answers all the ground level questions that I, (and I presume potential clients,) will have on the subject. It’s not flashy, or particularly visual – nowhere near as comprehensive as an e-book – it simply lays out the key areas you need to understand.

Their expertise in the area isn’t explicitly referred to – but is implicit in the fact that they have created this ‘all you need to know’ document, and put their name to it.

For me, and potential clients at the information gathering stage of a project, resources like this are invaluable. We don’t want to ‘ring for a free appraisal’ – talking is something that comes a bit later, when you’ve orientated yourself in the area, and you know what you don’t know, and where you need help.

However their website would be the first I’d go to, if I wanted more information. And were I looking to pick up the phone to someone, they’d be top of my list, because they have already shown themselves to be understanding of my situation, authoritative, and ready to help.

How to create a valuable document to signpost people to your company

It’s not difficult to create this kind of valuable document, it just needs a clear understanding of your potential clients’ problems and a willingness to share your expertise. Here’s what you need to remember:

1. Choose the right topic. What terms do people search for in your business? What are the most frequently asked questions from your newest clients?  Build a document that addresses this, and get it up on your website as a simple download.
2. Don’t write the book. This law firm’s pdf worked because it answered the basic questions, and laid the ground rules. Going into too much detail would be a mistake here. Signposting documents aren’t the place to show off everything you know, rather they should answer clients first questions, and lead them to the next stage.
3. Make it quality. Had this document been poorly written – stuffed with SEO filler words or simply not good to read – it would have had the opposite effect on me. Constantly being sent to a poor resource is irritating. If it’s going to surface again and again, make sure it stands up to all the attention.
4. Consider design. You don’t need to go overboard and invest in something too polished. Nor do you need images, it’s fine to produce something text only.
5. Think about typography. Potential clients are hungry for information, but they’ll still thank you for making it easy to digest: pick a user friendly font; consider judicious use of headlines to make your content easy to read on the web; allow enough white space to give the words room to breathe; break the text up into chunks.
6. Clear calls to action. This kind of document is the opposite of a hard sell sales piece, however you do want potential clients to know where you are once they’re ready to talk. Include some suggestions for further reading, and do include your contact details.

There’s an awful lot of business content out there today isn’t there? From blogs to books, ebooks to email, tweets, video, slides, webinars, podcasts and more: we’re a society on information overload. Whatever the medium, if the information you put out is not of high quality – really high – we’ll ignore it, block it, delete it, click away. You’ve got to go a long way for your content to cut through the noise.

But what makes ‘quality content’? How do you create content so valuable it can’t be ignored? I asked some of the thinkers I most respect for their views:

Content that is created with the buyer in mind

- David Meerman Scott

Quality content is to be determined by those who interact with the content. So the best way to create quality is to understand deeply the people who you are trying to reach. You need to create the content especially with your buyers in mind.

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker and author – www.webinknow.com.

Content that informs my world

- David Tovey

For me there are two types of content. The best is that which addresses my world, my issues and which makes me think the writer understands. After that it is content that informs and educates me, introduces new ideas and concepts that will help me to help my clients.

David Tovey is MD of PACE Partners International, a speaker and firm believer in Principled Selling – www.principledselling.org

Content that has substance

- Jane Northcote

The content I regard as valuable is:

• useful and functional – gives me answers
• beautiful and entertaining – gives me pleasure

It has to do at least one of those things. If it does both, I consider subscribing. You ask specifically about what I read. In general I am operating on a lap-top or vertical screen, having not yet succumbed to an iPad. So reading is actually quite difficult. I don’t want to read, I want to see.

Blogs that are valuable have substance: numbers, places, people’s names, descriptions of real events, graphs. I distinguish “substance” from “opinion”. Substance is more valuable than opinion. And opinion without substance is not valuable at all.

Jane Northcote is a management consultant, thinker and author of Making Change Happen – www.janenorthcote.com. You can read Jane’s full comment on content here.

Content relevant to each stage of the buying journey

- Bryony Thomas

Quality in terms of content is to a large part dependent on context. Even extremely insightful, well-written, content can be completely useless if presented at the wrong time, to the wrong person and at the wrong stage in the buying decision. I think it’s vital for content marketers to think carefully about the sales journey and to develop powerful content for each step of buying decision.

Bryony Thomas is a marketing speaker, author and consultant www.bryonythomas.com.

Content with a strong point of view, supported by design

- Christopher Butler

At the most basic level, valuable content is content that does its job, whether that be to entertain, to educate, or to sell. But that doesn’t do much to describe how content can meet this criteria.

Ultimately, I think the answer to what makes content valuable is similar (if not the same) to what makes good writing and good thinking. If I had to choose one key ingredient, it would be a writer or speaker’s strong point of view. A compelling point of view comes from a very fine balance of erudition and originality (or in other words, taking liberty with tradition). As Emerson wrote, “He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” That may be a bit grandiose for what we do, but there is a solid point here. Be well read, but not too well read. Be discerning in what you read, and wise about what you repeat.

On the web, there is another issue to consider: how good design supports good content. It’s not enough to simply publish a good article. The page that contains it needs to be designed to focus the attention of time-pressed, distracted readers and do so confidently, keeping its own distractions–advertisements, calls to action, related content widgets, etc.–to a minimum. Thoughtful originality is essential here. What works for big, unfocused audiences will not work for smaller, focused ones. For the rest of us, the better we are at knowing our audience, the better we’ll be at writing content they’re likely to read and respond to.

Christopher Butler is an author and Vice President of Newfangled, a niche US web development company specialising in websites that work for marketing services companies.

Content with meaning

- Charles H. Green

To be valuable content must have uniqueness at the client level, and it must be meaningful. Absent such meaning and “content” is just fodder for robo-marketing, a kissing cousin to spam. My advice:

• Don’t just produce content—say something.
• If your content doesn’t have a message, it’s just content.
• Don’t be content with “just content.”
• Content is less than the sum of the words; meaning is greater.
• When you write, speak or sing; do with a particular real person in mind.

Charles H. Green is a consultant, speaker, author of The Trusted Advisor – www.trustedadvisor.com and new book The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook. You can find his full comment on content here.

Value can’t be faked

Thank you to all who gave their ideas here. They sum it up for me. Truly valuable, high quality content has all the attributes they describe so well: it’s useful, relevant, informing my world world, created with deep understanding of the reader; it has substance, an opinion – all made visual by strong design.

And just one last comment from me: valuable content is not a ‘technique’ – you’ve got to care, to believe in what you put out there – true value can’t be faked.

What is your view?

How about you? What content do you find valuable and why? I’d love your thoughts.

Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott and many other 21st century marketing experts believe that content marketing has taken supremacy over all other forms of marketing today. They urge businesses to stop interrupting people with irrelevant messages and start providing them with information that is genuinely useful to them – either professionally or personally. Successful marketing has become all about sharing valuable information or ‘content’ with your buyers. It’s the approach we love and recommend.

But what you probably want to know is why? What makes new style content marketing so powerful today? And importantly, what does this all mean for more traditional marketing techniques?

Sharon has written an excellent article on the reasons why new style marketing with content at its heart is so popular. See her latest post: Why your clients prefer new marketing. As she explain, buying behaviour and attitude has changed radically. We’re in a new world with new rules of engagement and content marketing is the perfect fit.

But does this mean the death of traditional marketing? Personally, I’m not convinced it does. It just means approaching ‘old’ methods in a different way.

21st century business development expert David Tovey of PACE Partners talks about building the motivation to buy, leading with the valuable stuff and only selling when the time is right.

“Well researched and valuable content demonstrates better than anything else that you understand your buyer’s world – better than any brochure, e-shot or clever marketing device. If you can show you understand my world, my critical success factors BEFORE you try to ’sell’ to me I might just find you more interesting and am more likely to be interested in meeting you.” David Tovey, PACE Partners International

I think that traditional marketing techniques will always have a place. The best way to employ them is as support to your content efforts as David says, spreading the word about the valuable stuff to help get your message across.

• Send your clients a business book or article that gives them a new perspective on an issue they are tackling, then follow up with a phone call.
• Email something useful or entertaining: ’saw this and thought of you’.
• Advertise an educational event in just the right place.

Whatever you do you need to approach your marketing with the right mindset: never shouting, pressurising or trying to manipulate but understanding, respecting, helping, educating or entertaining your buyers – making it personal.

“All great marketing is about understanding the people you want to reach and creating something valuable, interesting or entertaining just for them.” David Meerman Scott

Content marketing is not the only form of marketing available to you, but in this world it certainly takes the crown.

There’s a lot of confusing talk around ‘new marketing’ so we thought we’d stamp our style on it to try and make it clearer. Even if it’s flavour of the month at the moment, at heart, it’s still sales and marketing. Just sales and marketing wearing different clothes, and talking in a way that’s easier on the ear and far more popular with your buyers.

New marketing requires different skills from those of the traditional approach. Potential clients just don’t want to be sold to anymore, in fact pushy selling hits the wrong note these days.

This was in my Twitter feed today.

“Uh oh, sales guy has just emailed with the words “discount available if you sign up before the end of the month” – red rag to a bull.”

Your audience won’t accept the old-style hard sell. Cynicism is epidemic.

“Really annoyed now – tempted to stop the whole sales process. I hate people trying to use sales tactics on me.”

We want to make up our own minds, thank you very much.  Kanye West of all people summed it up supremely in a recent tweet:

“Don’t ever try to sell me on anything. Give me ALL the information and I’ll make my own decision.”

Just hand over the information and we’ll do what makes best sense to us. The Internet gives us access to all the information we want. Your job is to provide us with the information we’re looking for and make it easy for us to find you.

If you want to please your clients and get success from your marketing today, you need a different approach. Wrestle access to your services away from a small sales pool, and spread news of them far and wide. Shape your messages differently, put together something solid that proves your business credentials, and engage more.

Here’s Valuable Content’s quick guide to ‘old’ marketing vs. new marketing, and our take on why the new style works so well.

‘Old’ marketing non-essentials

• A flashy website filled with sales spiel.
• Costly press advertisements.
• A glossy brochure.
• Pushy salespeople.
• Begging the trade press to write about you.

New marketing must-haves

• An engaging website that potential clients will easily find.
• A social media presence that makes connections.
• Great word of mouth recommendations.
• Trust building proof of your word.
• A stack of valuable content for use at every step.

Both the ‘old’ and the new style are trying to attract the attention. Both ways try to make your message memorable and sell your products and services. It’s the shift of focus that makes new marketing a better proposition for business owners. Getting to grips with how your clients think, understanding their needs, being clear about the problems you can solve for them gives your business an advantage.

And starting is not that hard. It just means listening, asking questions, and more listening. Take the spotlight off your services, and shine it on your clients. What problems are they grappling with? How can you help them?

Use this knowledge to create the kind of services your clients want, and build your content around it. New style marketing never underestimates the intelligence of your clients.  So if you’ve done your homework and your offer is right, there will be no need for the desperate ‘sign up now’ calls.  Your clients will come to you.

Are you looking for clarity on what you do? Everyone talks about knowing what your customers want and putting their needs at the heart of your business, so how about talking to them directly?

Ask your clients why they engage your services, what problems you solve and the benefits you bring. Check what they like about your service and what they think you could improve on. What makes you different or special in their eyes?

And the most powerful question of all? Ask them how they would describe what you do.

5 reasons why asking clients for direct feedback makes sense

1. Clients like to be asked. Contrary to what you may think, most clients really welcome your request. They want to tell you how they feel about your work and what would make the process even better for them in the future. Simply asking them makes them feel valued.
2. Your clients are the best people to tell you what you do. There’s nothing more powerful in marketing than the ability to see your company through your customers’ eyes. Often what you think you’re good at is not where the real benefit lies. This will give you a whole new perspective on what you do.
3. They’ll tell you how to market your business. Your customers know how they want to be communicated with and what information they like to receive. Ask them, and they’ll tell you honestly. They’ll show you where to focus your marketing efforts in the coming year.
4. You’ll get testimonials for your website. Positive feedback means valuable testimonials for your website. Most clients are happy to give you a testimonial after a successful project, but they find it difficult and time consuming to craft one. This process will ensure you get meaningful quotes without too much effort on your clients’ behalf.
5. It will boost your confidence. I’ve conducted this process for many business owners this year and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Any criticism has been wholly constructive. It’s a hard slog running a business and glowing feedback is a welcome boost, particular in these uncertain times.

Don’t conjure up your value proposition in a vacuum. Involve your clients in the process.

Getting someone independent or unconnected with the project to conduct this research often works best. Clients tend to be more open and honest if they talk to someone who wasn’t involved (and it’s less uncomfortable for you).

Select five of your top clients or projects, structure your list of questions in advance, pick up the phone and record their answers verbatim.

You’ll be amazed at the value of the information you get back.

Further reading:

For a bit of enlightenment on the client perspective, have a look at Sonia Simone’s fantastic article ‘50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew’.

Chocolate, wine, and shopping for shoes – just three of the things that aren’t on Valuable Content’s list of things to give up for Lent. 

We hope you’ll find our real selection more useful. Read on for a quick-fire list of the things we’d like to kiss goodbye to today.

1. Jargon.  There’s always a better way of saying it. Make your content clear and accessible to all your clients – like this. An independent view on what you’re writing can be handy to ensure you’re not slipping in phrases in that will alienate your readers.

2. Flashy websites with no useful function. There are still a few about, and we’d like to see them gone.  Design your website with your user in mind.  We guarantee they’ll want useful information that helps them solve a problem over something gimmicky any day.

3. Spamming people with unrequested sales messages, over and over again. If you’re not getting results, you need to try something else. Search our content toolkit for a better approach.

4. Websites you can’t update yourself. Your website should be the hub of your marketing – the living breathing centre of your business – bursting with relevant news, blogs, and information that potential clients will love.  If every change demands a phone call to your designer, the chances are you won’t make them. Switch to a platform you can update, we’re sure you’ll thank us for it!

5. Tweeting without listening and engaging. As more and more businesses wise up to the marketing potential of Twitter,  the good Tweeters are becoming clearer, and rarer. They’re the ones that talk as well as promote.  Good Tweeters retweet others’ links, and say ‘thank you’ when you retweet theirs. Twitter is not a free listings page, it’s a conversation that can engage and entertain as well as inform.  Join in and play nicely, that’s the Valuable Content way. 

What’s on your list? We’d love to know. And if we can help you with social media, new websites, or content for your business, please get in touch.

Valuable Content associate and message master Jim O’Connor shows you how to get your message not just heard, but accepted:

“When marketing your business, are you pushing on a door marked pull? I’ve done it. Then looked around to check who is watching. Embarrassing, or what?

Sadly I see a lot of small and medium sized businesses making the same mistake. Not just once. But repeatedly. They put a ton of effort into getting to the door of the audience’s consciousness with pay-per-click, SEO, contact lists, database management, email templates, Twitter, tracking systems, and a host of other technological tools. Only to find it shut in their face.

Why? Because most people are sick of being bombarded with sales and marketing messages – they just want to be left in peace. Getting prospects to open up requires a totally different approach.

How many geeks does it take to change someone’s mind? None!

A hi-tech approach will get the message delivered. But you need a hi-touch one to get it accepted. Hi-touch is all about seeing things from the audience’s perspective – understanding their feelings and emotions, hopes and fears, then tapping into them. That’s how the big successful brands do it – watch their TV commercials.

Take UPS. You can’t get more logical than logistics, and yet they succeed in making it sexy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRAHa_Po0Kg  

But what do most marketers do? They focus on themselves, listing as many features of their product and service as possible. They might throw in a few benefits, almost as an afterthought, but they tend to be logical (save time, save money, increase productivity, improved return on investment…).

All those benefits are in the UPS commercial (listen closely to the lyrics), but they are so skilfully wrapped up with positive emotions that it’s the heart which gets the message first. Here’s a hi-tech company that totally gets hi-touch!

Why the message must be hi-touch

People have incredibly short attention spans. If you don’t immediately focus on them, and plug straight into their heart, they hit the mental delete button.

People generally buy on emotion, then use logic to justify the decision they have just made. So the features, and the logical benefits can be in there – but you have to win their heart first. Look at the UPS commercial again. Note how the golden shield logo (logical benefit – protection) is repeatedly mirrored by golden hearts.

You are in a crowded marketplace. There’s little difference between what you and your competitors are offering. So listing features and benefits ensures you are not going to stand out – it’s marketing suicide! If you doubt this, read Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”. Or read the precis at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/67/purplecow.html

Do something different. Focus on what your prospect wants, show you understand how they feel, and then offer a solution (ideally expressed with a little wit and elegance). Immediately you leap out from the crowd. And suddenly the prospect likes you.

It’s not rocket science (precisely my point). It’s simple awareness of basic human nature. And it makes all the difference.

Stop pushing! You’re just annoying people.

But what do most businesses do? They get to a closed door, and push up against it with features and benefits. They knock, they shout, they push some more, desperately trying to stick logic in the audience’s face.

Then, eventually, they accept something is not working. But do they question the message, and the way it is being expressed? No. They stick with hi-tech and fiddle with the mechanics – let’s look at triggered email, let’s change the engagement metrics, let’s do more tracking via email analytics, let’s try Twitter, let’s get some more virtual phone apps…

They are missing the point. It’s the message! Give your messaging a thorough review.”

Thanks Jim. That’s a really important reminder to get the message straight before you start creating and sharing your content.

Jim O’Connor started his career as an advertising copywriter. His skills in pinpointing and expressing clear marketing messages are as pertinent today as they have ever been. You can find him at Stories That Sell: http://www.storiesthatsell.co.uk/.

Way back in the day, when I started work as a sales person for one particular consultancy company, I remember being handed a pack of marketing literature I could use to help me woo new clients.

The pack included: an expensively-printed brochure, with glossy flyers for each of our ‘unique’ services; a few out of date case studies that went on at length about how great the company was; a link to our good looking but content-poor website that apparently demonstrated how incredibly industry-leading, clever and utterly irresistible we were.

To be fair, this was more than I’d had at my previous employer, but in terms of building relationships with prospects I quickly realised it wasn’t a lot to go on.

You see, the carefully crafted sales messages behind all of this marketing content screamed self-absorption – desperately trying to demonstrate how special the company was without making clients and prospects feel special at all.

If you, like me believe that a better way to engage and build long-term relationships is by showing that you care about your clients, here are six good ideas for your content.

1. Be helpful in your content. Shift your attitude from ‘Me! Me! Me!’ to a laser focus on your target clients and their needs. In your content – on your website, articles, social media feeds and newsletters - think solving your client problems first. Continually deliver value in your marketing and you’ll be rewarded with interest and loyalty.
2. Be empathetic, and relevant. Show your clients that you really understand their particular situation. Address this upfront when writing your content, before you launch into what you can do to help. Much more engaging from a client perspective.
3. Keep in regular contact. The focus of most marketing is to attract new contacts, but the vast majority of companies forget to keep in touch once they’ve made that initial contact. Make keeping in touch a priority. There’s nothing less special than thinking you’ve being forgotten. > See: how to keep in touch with customers until they are ready to buy
4. Tell your client’s story, not your own. There is real power in this, particularly in your case studies. ‘Big up’ your client and their successes whenever you can. Reward them for their smart decision to work with you.
5. Don’t forget to make it personal. In these days of easy automation, remember the power of personal contact – mix up automated emails, tweets (and newsletter like this!) with direct, personal contact from you to them.
6. Surprise your clients. Client Jane Northcote sends beautiful handmade Christmas cards every year. Virtual assistant Eli Barbary sent me a card to thank me for choosing to work with her. Jay Blake at IchthusVideo sent me a fairy cake, timed to arrive at the time of our first Skype call! They all know how to make a girl feel special.

Building strong client relationships through your marketing is no different to developing any other relationship. Be authentic. Help, don’t yell. Prove that you care.

I’ve just had an email from a good friend. She’s an extremely creative event designer and decorator in the hospitality industry and she’s looking for a new job. She asked for my advice on her CV. I reworked it for her – pulling out the important messages and making sure they were clear, upfront and highlighted. I reformatted it to make it easy to read and gave the wording a quick polish. Her experience all stacks up; the CV is looking pretty good.

I also gave her some advice (I just can’t help myself these days); I’m pretty sure it will make a real difference to her job search (and hope she appreciates it!). My advice is this: 

“To prove how passionate and knowledgeable you are in your field, how about setting up your own blog? Your posts could be photos of design ideas you like, recent events you are proud of or just visual elements that inspire you. 

A blog like this is a great way to record your ideas for posterity and build a bit of an archive to remember for your next project. It’s also a fantastic way to prove your expertise and interest in your work, something that I’m sure would really wow a potential employer.”

My talented web designer friend and associate Iain Claridge does exactly that – he collects and posts image of design ideas that inspire him on his brilliant design blog:

• Check out Iain’s design blog - http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/

Iain set this up originally as a personal ‘brain dump’ for ideas: a repository for snippets of code and chunks of creative inspiration that he found whilst browsing the internet – important information that would otherwise be lost. The fact that others would find it equally useful as a source of information and inspiration was a bit of a surprise for him.

Iain’s blog is now recognised as one of the best design blogs around, with 78,000 unique visitors every month and an incredible 12,417 inbound links. It has been featured in design blogs such as grafik, surfstation and siteinspire and won Iain numerous design assignments – most notably from NASA! 

Iain’s blog is a perfect example of the approach I teach my business clients – get your passion out there, prove your expertise and commitment by producing some really ‘valuable content’. It’s a superb way to show a potential employer or customer that you are serious, knowledgeable and committed to what you do.

Valuable content works.