The book that wrote itself – web content for small businesses
By Angela Bensemann, Director, Halo Communications
I’m a writer – I write for other people all day, every day. It’s a part of my day job. To me words come easy – when I’m writing about, and for, someone else.
But, and it’s a big but, if I have to write about myself, my business, my services and why people should come to me I get the writing equivalent of tongue-tied.
Seems this is quite a common problem and was the idea behind my first co-authored and published book, The perfect recipe for creating awesome web content.
When I say ‘first published’ I don’t think the Bunnykin News I hand-wrote when I was 11 really counts.
Anyway, I digress. I was looking for a creative project, I really wanted to write a book – have wanted to for years. I started on a novel a couple of years back, but it was truly awful. (I may dust it off again at some stage and see if there’s anything worth salvaging, but that’s not for now.)
I’ve worked with web designer Iona Elwood-Smith of Grow My Business and Connection Station on a few projects now. She’s talked to me often over the years about needing someone to help her small business clients with creating their web content.
The content is usually the thing that holds up the website going live and can mean it sits on the cyber shelf for months waiting for that mythical content to appear. And she says when it does arrive it can be widely off the mark. Sometimes there’s so much content that it creates overwhelm and is totally off-putting to the customer. Other times there’s hardly any content at all which means that the website won’t be speaking well to Google and will be difficult to find.
Either way it causes a major headache for those starting up in business.
The problem is that these start-ups and small businesses usually don’t have much of a budget to play with and can’t afford to bring in the professionals for everything.
I thought that maybe Iona and I could approach the issue in a different way by providing a really practical and useful step-by-step guide helping those businesses to create the content they need.
Iona was keen to collaborate and contribute her knowledge on the practical aspects of page structure, the type of content that should be covered on each page and expertise on making sure your site will be found by search engines.
The more we thought about it the more we decided we needed to take a broader view of content –more than just the words, we wanted to also cover off imagery, branding and the overall look and feel as well.
Enter Jane Comben from Pogo Design. Jane is a very experienced brand strategist so knows what works – she added an extra dimension to the content and then used her design creativity to come up with the cover and illustrations throughout the book. We couldn’t be more pleased with how the whole book has come together and looks.
We realised we actually all worked pretty well together so decided to go a step further than just creating a book. We set up Collaboration Station as a platform for us to do more projects together. The thing is when we collaborate, we have three times the fun and we simply are better together.
If you’re a small business or have small business clients working on their websites this book is for you. You can get your copy of The perfect recipe for creating awesome web content here.
