Content strategist

Jan 27, 2006

I stumbled across a link where a person has promoted herself as a content strategist. Cool term, hmmm…This is the link I’m talking about. Another interesting thing: there seems to be just one page on the website. The only active link is the email link. This again is something quite different. I’m not saying there is anything wrong in it because the copy on the page is nice and persuasive and it gets the message across and yes, you need to read nothing more. Why should there be more pages if one page is enough to put your point across?

Two things: One, the website is not about you, it is about your work. Again, the website is not for you, it is for your clients — prospective clients, I mean. Assuming I’m your prospective client, how do I know you’ve really been writing stuff for Fortune 500 companies? Either I do some research, or write to you for a few samples. As a busy business person, doing research takes up lots of my time, so I can just write to you and ask for links and samples. For some it works and for some it doesn’t. For a majority it doesn’t work because now since I’m at your website, I might as well click through a few pages and go through other stuff you’ve written.

Two, the search engines. On this website, there is just an image that holds the text. Maybe they are not targeting the search engines. And they are definitely not targeting clients that want them to write for search engines. Almost everybody who works on the Web knows how important it is to have relevant content in order to get quality traffic from the search engines. There is a logical reason too — the more pages you have, the more you expose yourself. For instance on my content writing website I have lots and lots of content. Even to explain a small thing such as “optimized content” I have created a separate page. If I have more content on the topic specific to my field, the search engines know I know my stuff.

But anyway, they must have there own reason. What caught my fancy was the term “content strategist”. I like this expression.