But not everyone realizes what made Groupon stand out from other deal sites when the site launched three years ago: Great writing and a unique voice.

As The New York Times put it, “Groupon’s fate hinges on words.”

Whatever your business, you should pay attention to putting the best possible content in front of your customers.

Too many businesses today focus on search engine optimization as the means of attracting customers to their sites. But while a high Google rank may bring them in, it won’t guarantee that they convert into buyers, or that they’ll come back when they see the site in future search results.

That’s why Google’s human researchers have declared war on “content farms” that rank high in results but deliver weak content to those who click. Google is all too aware that users who hit too much bad content ultimately decided Google isn’t worth using.

Good content matters not just for news and how-to sites, it matters for retailers.

You’ve probably had this experience: You click on a site because it advertises a low price for a gadget. But the product writeups are so bad — negligent grammar, boilerplate descriptions, intractable prose — that you wonder if the company can really deliver, or if it might instead be a phishing scam run in some country you can’t find on a map.

By contrast, look at Amazon: Whether it’s a book or a USB drive, Amazon spends money to include professional reviews on its product pages, and curates the best customer reviews to appear immediately below them.

At a higher level, a badly-written company blog or an impossible-to-understand product description put off people looking to pay big money for premium products and services.

Weak content sends a message: We’re dumb. Or we can’t be bothered to make the effort to win you over. We’ll take your money, but will we know how to deliver the service and support you need?

You don’t need to go as far as Groupon’s whimsically fictional descriptions of its vendors. Follow the basics of writing: Be concise, be unambiguous, and explain the who/what/where/when/why that people need to know.

Give your site a personality customers can bond with. Look at Priceline: In theory it could compete by offering the lowest prices. In practice, it’s employed William Shatner and a team of writers and producers to give Priceline a personality. It makes others sites seem like Priceline-wannabes, whether or not they’ve got lower prices.

Even if you can’t afford Shatner, you can still give your business a voice. The good news for businesses is that the Internet has made it as easy to hire good writers as it is to find bad content.

Contently connects businesses looking for good writers with good writers looking to get the recognition and pay they deserve, without a lot of runaround.

The content on your site is the personality that customers will come to associate with your business. There are plenty of daily-deal sites, but Groupon has an edge over all of them: It’s the site people read even when they’re not buying. Isn’t that what you want your site to be?

Image courtesy of Flickr, swanksalot

But too many company blogs fail to get read or to attract regular readers, because they make a few mistakes that can be corrected with a small effort or a simple focus.

1. Your Blog is Too Hard to Find

Pull the latest blog post — or three — onto your company’s home page. A single link that says Blog atop the site won’t get clicked. You need to lure visitors into reading, just as newspapers and magazines do. Also, don’t spawn multiple blogs until you’re as big as Google. Put everything into one feed. Readers will choose what appeals to them.

Make your posts easy to share, too, by putting buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, other social networks, and email on each post. Emailed articles get a lot of clicks, because they’re person-to-person recommendations.

2. Your Blog is Too Hard to Read

Too many links and promotional images on posts have proven in tests to distract readers from finishing a post, or remembering it well. On company blogs, other stakeholders often press to have links to the rest of the site included in the blog template. Take a hint from the official Google blog. Despite all the links Google could add there, it’s kept it stripped down and focused on the blog posts.

3. You Don’t Post Regularly

This is the hardest one, yet not too hard once you get used to it: Post something every day before noon. That gets customers and fans into the habit of checking back regularly, as well as building up a hefty body of content quickly that will be found via search and links. Many companies try to get key employees to blog personally, but it’s hard for them to keep up after an initial burst. Put someone in marketing communications or PR on the job of getting a post out every day.

4. Your Posts Are Too Long

A blog post can be as little as 150 words. Most readers won’t hang in past 500 to 700 words. If you have more to say, make it a multi-part post. Don’t waste your work with a single superpost that doesn’t get read to the end.

5. You Don’t Have New Information in Your Posts

No one needs another commentary on an industry trend. Find something specific to add about your company or its products. Cite stats from studies, or from analysts who follow your company or its sector. One new nugget of info per post will keep readers coming back. Company success milestones, such as a million customers, are good blog fodder, too.

6. Your Blog is Too Insidery

Avoid this: “Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that the licensing issues with ABM are controversial.”

Presume I’ve been hiding under a rock. Presume I don’t know what ABM is, or if I do, I’m clueless about the controversy. Explain it to me in one paragraph. If someone tells you that your post is lame because “everyone knows this already,” congratulations. You’ve hit the mark.

Journalism 101 dictates that just because you say something is “unique” doesn’t mean it is. Presume you’ve got a new reader and clearly explain what you’re talking about, within reason, of course.

7. Your Blog is About You, Not the Customer

Resist the urge to use the blog to show how smart you are. Instead, show how helpful you can be.

Explain how to get and use the product. Demystify complex issues for customers. Republish the snippets of help or documentation pages they most need to see. Acknowledge problems quickly, and provide workarounds or promises to fix them soon. Link to Web pages and videos made by customers. Cheerily answer the dumbest questions you get, and start your answer with, “That’s a good question.” It is.

Related articles

• How To Optimize Your Company Blog (progressivemediaconcepts.com)
• 5 Things to do After Writing New Blog Post (ebiz-corner.com)
• How Google+ Fits Into a Content Strategy (contently.com)

Image by fensterbme via Flickr

Hiring an editor is a long-term decision that will have a much bigger effect on a site’s quality than hiring a part-time writer. With that in mind, there are three important rules to follow when recruiting an editor for your blog:

1. Determine Experience

It’s relatively easy to test a new freelance writer who may or may not work out. But for an editor, you want someone who has already proven they can do the job. In 2011, there are plenty of experienced editors looking for full or part-time work editing blogs. The first thing to look at in a candidate isn’t his or her resume, it’s the existing body of published work for which he or she was responsible.

Ask to see sites the candidate has edited. Ask whether the editing was substantive (meaning, did they direct the editorial voice of the site?) or were they mostly just copy-editing the content? Are they frustrated writers themselves or do they prefer to work with less experienced writers? If they are former writers, ask to see their clips, either print of digital.

Three questions to ask yourself: Does this past work meet your standards for quality? Has the editor proven the ability to publish at the pace you will expect on your own blog? And have they already hired and fired writers?

It’s OK if their past publications are different in content and tone than yours. Gossip blog Gawker’s super-snarky first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, now runs the much more grownup New York Observer. What’s consistent is that she can build and maintain a site people will read obsessively, which she has proven at several sites in between.

Finally, determine how well they understand the role social media plays in growing your blog. A social-media savvy editor is one who knows how to get your best posts out there to a wider audience and generate a “buzz” around your content.

2. Find Out How They Communicate

Editing is about communication; between you and the editor, between the editor and his or her writers. Some editors insist on using the phone to discuss important issues. Others hate phone calls and insist on IM, Skype, or text. Many more experienced journalists want everything important discussed in email, so they have an easily-searched permanent record of all conversations and decisions. Be sure you’ll be comfortable staying in touch all day, every day in a way that works for both of you.

In general, the more experienced and senior an editor is, the less chatty they are. They’ll send short messages that get to the point. It might seem like they’re blowing you off. Truth is, they’re being efficient, focusing on the words being published, and making sure you don’t miss critical issues among a bunch of idle chit-chat.

3. Don’t Scrimp on Compensation

The old adage, “you get what you pay for” stands here. While the conventional wisdom these days is that journalists are desperate for work, so they’ll take lowball salary offers, forego full-time benefits, and pay their own operating expenses (think: emergency computer repair) working at home, that’s a formula for hiring someone who will quit as soon as they find something better. A revolving door for writers might work, but if you end up swapping editors every few months your site will never reach its potential. Readers won’t tell you. They’ll just stop clicking.

Pay for a professional who will stick around and better, take “ownership” of the site. You will see results in more quality content and in increased traffic.

Content providers should definitely work Google+ into their content strategy, but be aware that Google+ is both like Facebook, and different from it, in important ways.

Keep the Same Format as Facebook for Links

A content link posted to Google+ looks almost exactly like the same link shared on Facebook. There’s a title, a thumbnail image scraped from the site (Google doesn’t let you choose as Facebook does, but it usually gets the right one), a short text excerpt also scraped from the top of the page, and a space for the person doing the sharing to enter a short text comment above the post. Whatever you’re doing to share content on Facebook, you can do in parallel on Google+.

Add Google’s +1 Button to Your Site

If you haven’t yet, add Google’s version of Facebook’s Like button — the +1 button — alongside the Facebook and Twitter buttons you probably already display on each post on your site. This lets Google+ users one-click a recommendation to their friends. It also affects Google’s ranking of content in search results, although the company has been coy about exactly how that works.

No Fan Pages, No Ads, No Apps — Yet

For now, Google+ only allows individual people to create profiles. You can’t create a page for your blog or for a “celebrity” blogger (I know, it’s a relative term.) There are no ads on the system, nor can you publish an app that tries to send your content viral. So for now, you’ll have to rely on individual writers or editors — or an intern — sharing your content links on their own Google+ pages.

Google+ URLs Work Outside the Network

Here’s a reason to post your content to Google+ now: Unlike Facebook, a public post to Google+ has an externally visible URL at plus.google.com that non-members can click to read. The post will also be indexed by Google’s search engine, which a Facebook post won’t be.

But don’t expect much Google traffic yet. The company isn’t pushing up Google+ posts in its search results. Googling most popular authors, such as Anthony De Rosa, doesn’t return their Google+ posts anywhere near the top of Google’s results. That’s fair, because those posts have not yet become widely linked from already high-ranking Web pages.

Also, Google+ entries are titled “Post by Anthony de Rosa,” which means they won’t rank well for a search on your linked content page’s title or text. But they do add to your linked content’s ranking, since each post is a link from the highly-ranked plus.google.com domain. Google seems to be resisting the urge to give themselves a boost in the rankings.

Take it Slow

Some bloggers, such as Digg founder Kevin Rose, have already redirected their blogs to their Google+ accounts. That’s fine for a personal site, but a publisher should stick with their existing site, which has an established network of inbound links and bookmarks.

For now, add the +1 button, and get contributors to share their posts on Google+. With a minimal amount of work, it will put your content in front of a fast-growing audience of mostly heavy Internet users.

Related articles

• How Will Google Plus Affect SEO? (readwriteweb.com)
• Google’s +1 Button Challenges Facebook’s Like Across the Web (mashable.com)