By Kayla Matthews
There are dozens of ways to nurture the credibility and authority of your website. Some of the most common methods include authoritative articles, ebooks, interviews with high profile people, and how-to videos. These can all be effective ways to deepen the influence your business has within its industry and with your target market.
Featuring such educational resources on your website, you can further your influence, drastically improve your online presence, and, ultimately, increase conversions. Here are nine reasons you should add them to your site.
1. Establish Trust with Your Audience
When you feature educational resources such as informative blog posts, tutorials, videos, etc., they provide useful services to your audience that won’t instigate wariness against a “catch.” The resources are there for users, period. This kind of one-sided giving is a great way to gain the trust of your website visitors and target audience.
2. Establish Industry Authority
When you have in-depth knowledge about your industry, you also know where, what and how to pass on external resources and related information. Even if the educational resources are indirectly or marginally related, they still imply in-depth experience in your industry. If the resource comes directly from your business, this reinforces industry authority all the more.
3. Provide an Opportunity for Inbound Links
When you establish your site as a provider of consistent and highly useful information, people will naturally link to you. This may come from blogs, non-competing related sites, social media or media sources. The higher the quality of your educational resources, the higher the chances are for incoming links of equal value.
4. Advertise Your Own Educational Content/Materials
Educational resources can be listed on a separate “resources” page, but a better way to include them in your website is to place them as links at the bottom of an article or blog post, or distribute them relevantly throughout the website. This creates a consistent way for you to link to your own how-tos, ebooks, videos , off-site articles and so forth, which can not only drive traffic to more of your webpages but also provide a consistent and relevant method for internal linking on your site.
5. Provide an Opportunity for Blog Reviews
This may require some proactivity on your part. Search the blogosphere using specific related keywords and/or free educational products you provide (such as a guide or free software). Contact the blogger with a polite email, and ask if they would consider mentioning you as a related resource. For example, if you provide any kind of manufacturing, household products, etc., you can easily create an educational video or other resource related to environmental awareness or green advocacy.
6. Create a Source for Social Media Content
What better to tweet, pin or post than educational resources that will appeal to a wide array of users and potentially draw more traffic? Let’s say a small independent clothing retail business creates an “insiders tips” tutorial on embroidering. The business can then promote this tutorial on social media, using #fashiondesigntips or, perhaps even better, #embroideringdesigntips. The business could also tag the tutorial itself with the same hashtag.
This kind of approach will help ensure connection with a related audience. As an aside, it is wise not to try to promote your business while promoting your educational resource, but do include a call to action, such as “check out this helpful tutorial on embroidery” or “click here to see great tips on embroidery.”
7. Create a Source For Re-Purposed Content
Educational resources can be referenced later and re-purposed for content. Content marketers often struggle with producing fresh, quality content. Your many educational resources — blog posts, software, video clips, ebooks — can be sources of content topics. Let’s say your site provides a few different free software downloads. That software can then be re-purposed in an article about tips for using said software for better production, organization, distribution, etc.
8. Become a Source for High-Profile Guest Posts
Educational resources are a great way to establish a relevant connection between your business’s site and one with greater industry authority. If you have a business consulting service, and you have educational resources for small business loans and/or information about investors for small businesses, you can easily contribute to a financing or banking site, which would definitely help develop your online presence and industry authority.
9. Recognition from Authoritative Media Sites
The best way to do this is to keep regular correspondence with reporters or media sites. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a good method for doing that. You get three emails per day from reporters looking for sources. When you get a related email, respond with links or references to your educational resources, your credentials and your input, and you’re likely to get featured on one of the corresponding news site.
Many of the benefits and opportunities with which educational resources provide you require being proactive on your part. Using educational resources will establish a lot of opportunities for you, but you still have to work to reap the benefits, as is the case with many kinds successes; not just the online ones.
