When you run a business – large or small – your website is often the first place potential clients and customers get to know who you are and what you do.

And to showcase your business in the most professional way? It's vitally important for your business website to feature quality content. To understand why – and learn how you can achieve it on your own site – we asked writer Violeta Balhas to share some insights.

How important is quality content on your business website?

Remember that "content" refers to anything a visitor to your website sees, reads, hears, learns, or experiences there, so that covers pretty much everything - from the web copy to the quality of your photographs, to your core informational content.

There are people out there preaching that all you need to do is populate your site with content – any content. They must have read the memo wrong! Content must be consistently good, and good and consistent. The Internet is mature and has masses of content; this means that web visitors can afford to be choosy, and so can Google. Lacklustre content just won't cut it.

What main boxes should a business owner tick when creating content for their website?

First, make sure that you have a core message: this isn't a pretty mission or vision statement, but a message that underwrites all your communications. Second, make sure you are addressing your target audience as opposed to, I don't know, your Year 12 English teacher. Talk to them (and not at them, by the way), in a clear, individual, and engaging voice. Finally, make sure that your content serves some sort of useful purpose. For your audience – not you!

How important is understanding your target audience when creating content?

Understanding your target audience is incredibly important, and much of the work I do with businesses, big and small, involves really getting to know their target audience, before we do anything else. What I see, over and over again, is that they've gone to the trouble of creating buyer personas or "avatars", but don't really know them, and can't create content for them to save their lives. This is because they haven't learnt to use their personas – they just figured creating them was a kind of hocus-pocus that would make real customers somehow magically appear.

But your target audience should be foremost in mind for two vital reasons. First, when you know your target audience, you can predict what kind of content they want and need. And

second, knowing who these people are directly informs your voice: your content automatically becomes better because you're addressing someone you know, rather than a huge, unknown audience.

How can business owners get their key message across in the most effective way possible?

Many small businesses attack content with everything they've got. It's all the content, all the time! This may be fine for a little while, but I've never seen any small business keep up this level of momentum past a couple of months. It's huge, and it's exhausting. Expensive too, if you're outsourcing your content creation. I think the best thing a business owner can do to get their key message across in the most effective way is ask herself, "What is the bare minimum I can do consistently, and really, really well?" I'm a huge believer of doing just one thing brilliantly, consistently. It's efficient, and it works. For example, doing one SlideShare a week, even though it's a simple and easy thing to do, will have a bigger impact than a feature-length blog whenever you have the time, or having spasmodic periods of frantic activity.

Top tips on making your written communications authentic and 'on-brand'?

As much as I believe in buyer personas, let's not kid ourselves: they're no substitute for real people. Talk to your customers and listen to them. Listen to their concerns, their interests, their loves and hates. And when they give you feedback on your content, take it on board.

Having a clear, individual, engaging voice is not something that happens automatically after you've created your personas/avatars and a voice and style sheet: it's something that comes after much writing. It takes time and effort but stay the course. It will grab your readers better than anything else can.

Being authentic and on-brand means living by your message, 24/7, as well as communicating your message.

Care more about the writing, and the message, than about your ego. When you do this, it makes fear, embarrassment, shame, and nerves about your writing disappear. When you care more about the writing than your precious feelings, you're also not afraid to put it through its paces: you become a ruthless editor and critique-taker, because it's for the ultimate good of the piece.

You can connect with Violeta via her website.