Imagine a high street shop selling nothing but four inch high fuchsia pink stilettos - hardly a recipe for success (except maybe in Chelsea) but its a problem faced by virtually every start-up website - lack of content.
No matter if your website is selling shoes or motor tools or is an information only website you need a critical mass of content before your site will be attractive. The reason for this is simple - you need to ensure customers stay as long as possible on your site and, more importantly, come back time and time again and the only way to do this is to continually refresh and increase the amount of content on your site. If you're a blogger or video producer people will want to see more of your excellent work but if you only have two or three pieces on show they have no reason to come back for more. Everyone knows the "difficult second album" problem faced by bands (all the good stuff on the first one and only the leftovers on the second) and this problem is worse for on-line content providers.
The problem is even worse for on-line retailers. After a success on EBay selling a couple of lines the shop owner decides to launch their own site only to find very very few customers despite all the SEO and Adwords they can afford to throw at it. In these cases the problem is almost certainly lack of products.
One reason why business owners don't put up enough content (or products) on their site is because they don't think like the customer. You may have been hugely successful selling fishing reels on EBay but try setting up a website with only fishing reels (or 4 inch pink stilettos) and you'll only have a fraction of the success because customers buy in a different way to the way you're trying to sell to them.
If you're into fishing you'll maybe buy a couple of reels a year but you'll buy hooks, weights, line, bait etc etc etc time and time again and you'll have a favourite place to buy these bits. Whilst you're in the the shop buying bait you'll spot a new reel and maybe pick it up (maybe not straight away but eventually) and you'll probably pay £1-£2 over the odds just for the simplicity of buying everything from one place. Unless Reels-R-Us.co.uk are extremely cheap you may never bother going there. Reels-R-Us are failing because they don't have the critical mass of products to make them the go-to place for all fishing accessories (not just reels).
This is why the Bemoths of on-line news content (bbc.co.uk, cnn.com etc) attract such a huge proportion of the on-line viewers - they have the mass and range of content allowing users to browse virtually endlessly.
So how do you build critical mass?
Answer: With great difficulty. The huge web sites are often an offshoot of an established brand and so can easily access large amounts of content and stock whereas a start-up doesn't have the legacy (or cash) to do the same. But what you can do is focus and be targeted in your content. Don't spread yourself too thin in a scattergun approach but equally don't fixate on a single product range. Think of what other things your customers will or might need at the same time when they're buying your core product and try to fill in around those core items. Then, over time, expand carefully into other areas, each time trying to ensure the range of content or products offers your customers the right mix of stuff to retain their interest.
Karl Meyer
Associate www.spice.co.uk
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