If a movie is no good, it bombs at the box office. If a sitcom just isn’t very funny or entertaining, it gets canceled.

And if your content online isn’t any good, you may not realize directly but visitors begin to “vote” by not staying long or coming back to your website.

This applies even more to articles that are “spun” (articles that have interchangeable words within them, but often end up quite grammatically incorrect) or are written by folks in other parts of the world (cheaply) where English is not their first or even second language.

So what questions should you ask to make sure you are creating good online content? The first critical point is that the article or post, etc. be free of grammatical errors, misuse of words and typos. There are many techniques to do this.

In general you also need to make sure your audience cannot get this same exact information from another source. In other words, you need to add a unique take to what you as a content writer are creating. And the material must go beyond the “general knowledge” to be expected of most Internet users, unless your topic happens to be remedial and for the inexperienced. Your article must also add original thoughts or angles that extend the research you have done on the topic. What else?

1) Am I answering a question I’ve heard from everyday interactions or experience when writing my web content, and do I offer concrete or actionable advice, data or other info to my readers in my writing?

2) Was the title of the article or blog post misleading? In other words, did I stay on topic or get off track and write about things unrelated to the title of the article, press release or post?

3) Are the links within my Resource Box relevant to the topic, or does it lead the audience to something completely unrelated?

4) And finally (what I feel is) the most important question – “Am I proud to have my name, company’s or brand’s name associated with this web content?”

The answer to the last question is probably ‘NO’ to a large portion of the content out there.

So if you cannot respond to this last query with a yes, you may need help crafting your web content, or need to spend more of your own time and resources to ensure that your organization is always represented well online…the key to online conversions.