Website Content Plan Depends on Constant Change

A website content plan requires constant change if the site is meant to survive and succeed.
Any business that does the same thing year after year and decade after decade has little chance of surviving, much less growing. It is especially true in a dynamic and rapidly changing online environment.
Yes, there are exceptions. Some businesses produce certain goods and services without much change over a long period of time. The newspaper industry is a good example because it mostly has done the same thing for 300 years — produce print newspapers.
The newspaper industry is also a good example of what happens when an industry is too slow to change when the environment rather suddenly and quickly moves in a different direction.
Think Internet. It has led to massive losses in circulation and advertising revenue for print newspapers. Their websites have not come close to making up the difference because they haven’t stayed competitive.
The online industry is filled with thousands of businesses if not more that couldn’t find their way beyond a strategy that sounded good to investors. They maybe even worked for a while and then collapsed.
Consider some of the biggest online companies today. Verizon, formerly the parent company of AOL and Yahoo!, made major layoffs of those staffs. Both AOL and Yahoo! used to be independent online giants. They are now fragments of their former selves.
Google eliminates products and services on a regular basis. The death of Google+ is one of the biggest and most notable examples.
Companies like the ones above give 100 percent to making a product or service successful. They spend enormous effort and money on trying to find the right strategy if the initial vision doesn’t work. They often make major changes in leadership and the product or service.
But when success is beyond reach, those companies kill off their creations and move on to something else.
They change to survive rather than fighting a losing battle. An important part of change for website publishers is a focus on evolving content strategy.
When and How to Change a Content Plan
When to change a content plan was yesterday. If not yesterday, then today. It’s another way of saying that content strategy must evolve on a regular basis before the unique visitors start to dwindle or before the search engines start to lower the rankings of a site.
It also must evolve before competitors make their own changes and gain critical advantages. There is no time to act except now.
How to change content strategy starts with just a few simple steps at least weekly if not daily:
- Review site analytics from a variety of perspectives. Check them at least weekly.
- Review outside sources of information such as webmaster blogs, industry announcements and analytical tools from major web management companies.
- Fine tune search engine optimization for all of the most important pages on a site.
- Grow the content and optimize it continuously.
These efforts won’t necessarily produce major insights every day or every week. But they will make content strategy a top-of-mind activity for website publishers.
They also increase the odds of at least surviving if not thriving. Thriving is great. Surviving is better than collapse.
Even Small Businesses Need Change
The digital landscape isn’t littered just with the dead bodies of companies that lost millions of dollars (and sometimes much more). The landscape has many more small businesses that couldn’t survive or find the right way to change.
A recent case in point is the massive decline in Google AdSense revenue sharing with partners. Anecdotally, webmaster message boards are packed with small companies complaining about major drops in revenue they get from the AdSense ads they put on their sites. Google is holding onto more high-paying ads rather than sharing them. The online revenue growth rate is slowing. There is only so much money to share.
Small online publishers who depended on AdSense as a major income source now must choose between dying or changing. The ones who change successfully will find new sources of income, such as client work and book publishing.
All of this means that the survival of an online business — large or small — depends on a strategy of change.