A resource centre is the talk of the day. All the websites that have established their thought leadership virtually have their own content resource centre. What is a resource centre, why does it matter and how to create one – if you are looking for answers to these questions; you are reading a relevant article.

This article will cover the following topics of interests concerning the core subject of today’s discussion: CRC; which is short of Content Resource Center!

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1 . Gather your content

2. Develop a structure

3. Enable social sharing

4. Promote the resource center

5. Challenges to resource center

Well, let us now start with the subject in its most basic sense. What is a content resource center? A content resource center is a section on your website where you develop, publish, and organize content in such a way that it becomes extremely easy for your visitors to find the content they need.

In other words, a content resource center offers a simplified preview of your website content. Adding a resource center to your website enhances visitors experience and improves your website’s performance.

The key purpose of a content resource center is a developer school to educate visitors, leads and customers that how your standalone solutions can help and guide them solve and fix their problems. It seeks to organize content in a uncomplicated manner so that readers can find information easily accessible and search engines easily read the website. A resource center helps improve search engine optimization of a page, builds a dedicated community of informed and educated readers, generate streams of leads and even help convert readers into customers.

Why do you need a resource center – Most of the answer to this question is covered in the above para. A resource center organizes important information of a website, helps mitigate risks of information overload and fragmentation of a website, makes information accessibility simple, and ensures the website’s SEO is done properly. In simple words, you need a resource center to make your website search engine optimized and help your readers gather, and process information easily. It democratizes your content so that anybody from anywhere using any device can flawlessly access it and use it for maximum benefit.

Let us summarize the findings –

A resource center will –

Educate visitors, leads and customers about your website

Improves the stickiness of your website by gathering all thought content in one area

It encourages easy discovery of content in a website

When content is easy to find and inter connected, people are more likely to read you

It generates leads, and helps search engine crawl your website easily

Screen grab of SEO MOZ Resource Center (presently replaced by new section)

How to develop a content resource center? The most important step before developing a resource center is to develop evergreen content that works. Here is a list of the most successful content formats that have proven to yield better revenue potential and maximize the value of a resource center –

Interviews

Lists

Social Content

Guide

Polls and surveys

Reviews

News

Case Studies

Predictions

Comparisons

Contests

Gather your content

This is perhaps the most important step while developing a resource center. Organize your content by grouping them. For that, create a spreadsheet and group it by the nature of content of your website.

You can categorize based on the type and nature of the content mentioned above

Create a homepage

The resource center need to have a homepage or in other words a main parent section; which briefly summarizes what this section is all about, and then gradually populates with all the important information you have to build a resource center. Each section of the home page should be easily documented and explained. List each piece of content by category with links that redirects to the subject’s landing page. It is always important to keep your resource center updated.

Develop a structure

Once you have the home page developed, you should structure the content in such a way that it becomes extremely easy and simple for visitors to navigate it. The structure need to be discoverable and populated with simplified navigation. It should have all the basic ingredients of relevant content structuring.

Enable social sharing

Your resource center should be easy enough for visitors to share content socially. Add social sharing buttons on your home page, landing page and thank you page.

Promote the resource center

The most vital step within the creation of a resource center is to market and promote it quickly using holistic range of measures that work. Make resource center at the top of your page so that it is easy for your visitors to find it. Evenly scatter the content around the most important keywords and linking

Resource center should have easy to find search bar, display all recent content, have proper linking and social buttons. It should have the facility to search by the date. It should have all the latest content distributed ad formatted in a skillful and structured manner.

Challenges to resource center

Developing fresh and useful content, maintaining the flow of publishing content, finding out relevant content for publishing, using structured system to keep pages evergreen, maintaining and managing evergreen post format etc.

So, that’s all about a content resource center. It is all about making your most useful content easily searchable by your targeted audience and also making it extremely simple and hassle-free for search engines too crawl your website. The purpose of a resource center is to establish thought leadership. The most useful and read websites of companies have their own structured resource center. In order to leverage most of your resource center, the first step is to develop useful content followed by publishing thought content across key segments and then socially promoting it.

Resource center simplifies your content discovery and if used well, it can establish you as a thought leader.