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No matter what business you’re in, if you have a website you’re in the publishing business, too. And you need to keep what you publish fresh and new. Maybe not on a daily basis, but often enough to attract the right visitors. Which is what fresh content does. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Update content continually. Stale websites get pushed down in searches. The ones whose pages feature fresh material, images, links and keywords zip upwards.

2. You can’t blog too frequently. Not only is it an automatic content refresher, it personalizes your brand with personal outreach to customers and prospects.

3. Link back to your own site. Good way to increase traffic is to add in a few links back to your own pages within the text of every new page you create. Descriptive keywords draw search-engines crawlers. It’s another reason why blogs drive (attract) traffic.

4. Use video and images. Because their volume is so small compared to the text that’s out there, they are especially attractive to search-engine spiders.

5. Constantly track and analyze. Alexa and Google Analytics are simple to use and deliver invaluable information about your search standings and web traffic. Best of all, they’re free. Use them.

Keep in mind it’s not about quantity but quality. You want to see a growing number of the right kind of people. What are you doing to grow the right traffic on your site?

It’s satisfying to see principles that we’ve touted for years enjoy more traction and visibility in today’s Sales 2.0 world. The concept of revenue-minded marketing is a prime example. A post today in a Marketo’s blog calls out the new focus on sales and marketing alignment intended to maximize each function’s specific skills and what they do best. In fact, the software vendor urges marketers to be more “revenue focused”. Amen, indeed.

The message to marketers? It’s never been enough to only be good at “messaging”. To be a sales-minded marketer, your content must be informed by sales-mindedness. Familiarity with the world your customers live in. Being conversant in their daily issues. At the very least, all terminology of campaigns and product materials must reflect the language of customers and prospects. Ditto for website copy, collateral, and anything else seen by customers, users and prospects.

Tools such as those available from vendors like Marketo and Eloqua among other things enable predicting future revenue based on present efforts. When investments in marketing generate revenue, and everyone can see and measure the cause-and-effect, you make course corrections faster. You can better allocate your budget. Added bonus: making your budget case for a bigger investment will not fall on deaf ears of management. And then you’re free to focus on even more revenue-minded marketing content.

Good marketing and branding have always been about creating word-of-mouth, stories, and legend. Today with word-of-mouth spread so quickly and easily it’s more powerful than ever. Companies with the marketing gene, like Apple, have elevated WOM to an art form. The trick is, there has to “there” there. Your brand’s underlying value proposition, especially in B2B marketing, has to consist of a product benefit greater than the sum of the product’s adoption cost plus its price. The bigger the delta, the more compelling the value proposition.

Still, just as every generation wants to believe that it invented sex, new marketers assume that a brand “identity” or brand promise is something you can go out and buy and put on like trendy shoes. They soon discover that their brand is not their shoes. It’s their feet. It’s not the belt, it’s the waistline. It’s not what you put on your head, it’s what’s inside.

A brand’s value proposition isn’t a pitch, it is whatever is most relevant and compelling to a buyer. Think of a brand as a product’s or a company’s character. It has to stand for something. Which means that it cannot stand for everything. If it tries to, it will stand for nothing. This is part of the reason why great, leading brands, not unlike great people, are rare. There’s a natural inclination of the heart to be liked. To be everybody’s everything so as not to offend or alienate anybody. Your brand must stand for something…or nothing at all. What does your brand stand for? How do you know? How you convey it?

Testing and measuring the content you put online is faster and easier than ever today.  And budget-friendlier.  Which headline will draw a bigger response?  Which approach will visitors prefer?  Which offer?  Which tone?  Here are 20 tips on how to perform basic A/B testing:

1.  Don’t test a page you already suspect is weak.  Test something you believe is doing a good job.  You may be surprised.

2.  Use an overlay page (one that shows up when a respondent does something) when the visitor chooses the leave an “offer” page.  The overlay should remind the visitor of something that will entice them not to leave and get them to think “What the hell, I’ll fill out the form”.

3.  Get up and stand away from your screen. Take a look at your page(s) from five or six feet away.  What jumps out?  What attracts the eye?

4.  Make the “Download Now” words big and clear.

5.  Use separate buttons for different demographics or different categories of customer.

6.  The word “enterprise” is stronger than “corporate”.  People don’t think of themselves as corporate.  They identify with working in an enterprise.  Don’t you?

7.  Begin your order forms on the page that first mentions them.  Don’t make visitors go somewhere else.

8.  Use images of people, not products.

9.  Test all images of people for positive responses.

10. Don’t spend money on testing.  There are plenty of free tools out there.

11.  If you hire a vendor, remember that the best ones will guarantee results.

12. Your test should run three weeks (15 business days).

13. Measure all ongoing traffic simultaneously.

14. Start by testing something small.  A page, a portion of a page, a few lines, a small campaign.

15. Seek to drive down your cost-per-visitor and your cost-per-conversion.

16. Determine your most important metrics as dictated by your business model, business plan, sales and marketing objectives.  Your particular business mission.

17. Test pages that are politically “neutral”, at least at first, before you test your boss’s pet page to show how lame it actually is.

18. Work closely with your IT people.  Make sure that something you set up to test doesn’t bring down your site or cause a sudden, prolonged downturn in traffic.  Make sure there is a quick fix at hand.

19. Test early and often.  Google does (and they’re pretty smart).

20. Test one or two things at a time.

What are you doing to ensure you’re content is the best it can be?

Nobody outside your company, except the analysts who follow you, wants to read about your product’s “success story”. What they want to read is a story about a customer, just like them, who had success. The fact that it was your product they had success with is incidental, not central, to the story.

Knowing this difference and how to craft a case study around it makes all the difference. If you want the case study you are paying good money to produce to have impact, be read, be referenced and shared, mention your product only in passing. Write about the customer’s experience: the problem, the hassles, getting the solution up and running and the happily-ever-after: how the solution solved the problem, cut costs and/or buffed revenue. In other words, write something that readers can identify and empathize with. Write to and for them. Anything less is prescription-free Ambien.

First, please indulge us as we make this shameless (but mercifully brief) pitch on our own behalf. Putting concepts into words and words online is all we do. And we specialize exclusively in the content of high-technology and cleantech. Our writers are, by any standard, accomplished technology-marketing practitioners with the rich credentials that come with decades of great work for great clients. Not to mention years of experience in the news business. OK, end of commercial.

Three considerations come into play when you’re contemplating outsourced writing: your time, the skills available (in-house) and your workload.

Your time. You know when you are crazy-busy and start sensing the invisible choke-hold called sudden priorities. People want everything at once. And they want it now. There’s a product launch right at the moment when budget revisions are due, you need face-time in the field, the website needs work and you simply do not have the resources. Translation: You need help. Now. Problem is, there isn’t any there. Bottom-line on the time factor? You have projects for people to work on and no one available to work on them. Sound familiar? Read on.

Your skill(s). You’ve probably noticed that projects having to do with content today involve more complexity and call for a wider range of skills. While you might be a savvy wordsmith in your own right, the moment will arise when you need to deliver something that you just cannot, for one reason or another, do in-house. This is the moment when it pays to reach out to a trusted service capable of matching your pace, domain knowledge and intensity; one fluent in the vocabulary of your business. One capable of deliverying killer content on time and on budget.

Shane Pearlman, who runs a 100% freelance creative agency, puts it this way: “Sometimes, you simply get stuck. If you are lucky, the problem is small and you can tap your community for an answer. Other times, you need an expert who hasn’t been staring at the same issue for the last three months. Bringing in fresh blood for a quick infusion of new ideas can be a huge help”.

Your work-load. Always dicey, but if you have surges of content-generation activity that are intermittent, seasonal or temporary, a reliable writing service can represent a compelling value proposition. The watchword here is reliable–which is generally predictable on the basis of reputation. Being good (read: reliable) and available on-demand is the key. Given adequate lead-time most writers will come through. Adequate lead time? We don’t live on that planet. There is a book one of us read back-in-the-day, entitled “Deadline Every Minute”. Never expected it would come to describe a way of life but it is the life that the team at Write Angle has chosen. We’re sure you can relate.

Point is, you need quality when you need it, not when the writer finally delivers it. When doing your diligence, be sure the referrals specify “Worked well under extreme pressure” and “Kept budget promises”.

Re that last point, we’ll say this: Look for real value in a value proposition. Some of our people’s best work has been what you might describe as emergency salvage. We know how to rescue and recover projects that began on the cheap for clients trying in vain to save a buck. The better choice, of course, would be to choose WriteAngle in the first place. We do it right. From the start. Welcome to WriteAngle. Our clients will gladly tell you more.