Content. Content, content, content. It is everywhere. People churn the stuff out. Content, blog posts, social media posts, videos, etc. podcasts –some people do them every day.
But you don’t need to churn out tons of content. There is a thought in blogging that you have to keep generating new content, otherwise Google will forget about you and your readers will go elsewhere. But it’s not true.
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There are many examples where yes, a lot of content is made but they tend to be large organizations such as Huffington post, Buzzfeed, Social Media Examiner, they spend thousands upon thousands every month on their content.
We are not talking about them, unless you are huge. But the rest of us don’t need to do it. And if you want to release yourself from the overwhelm and from the pressure of having to constantly churn out content, there is a way around it.
Because what we tend to fail on is promoting that content, or we write a post, we put a lot of effort into it and that’s it.
Now one of the reasons this came up is because in my team, Caroline was talking to Jennifer about some information.
I think Jennifer sent in a post which Caroline was looking for. And in fact I’d forgotten. Within our posts, it was one of our own posts that summarized all of our top posts in a particular topic.
I’d completely forgotten we had it. Because it got buried in amongst everything else. We had not promoted it enough. We are now going to reuse it.
Now this post was written quite a long time ago. On the Marketing for Owners website you’ll notice that we have removed the dates from posts. So that 1, people who read don’t think, ‘Oh gosh that’s out of date,’ because it isn’t.
We tend to write evergreen content that can be reused. But secondly it removes the pressure from us of having to say oh we post twice a week or once a day or anything like that.
Produce Quality Content
Now you are going to produce good quality blog posts. So you’re only going to write about subjects that your audience needs you to write about.
If you are in a normal business, those posts are generally the most effective ones and that is questions. Questions that your customers or potential customers ask you all the time. Answer them in a post.
Or questions they should be asking you, but they don’t know enough to know to ask you. Answer that as well. So that’s going to be great information.
Now once you’ve got it, don’t let it go. So promote it at the time, but then bring it back up.
Put Them on a Spreadsheet
So as you write these, what I recommend is, first of all, get yourself an excel spreadsheet. In fact, better still, if you have any form of google account, a Gmail account, anything you have a google account, you have access to google docs and google sheets.
The reason I recommend that is that because it’s online and this is a very simple thing. It updates, it’s easy to share. Piece of cake. So list every single blog post title in that google sheet.
Then in the next column put a full link to the actual post. Next one is put the date of publishing. In the next one put a review date.
Now some of these things, if you are in a business where you might talk about regulations or something like that, put a review date.
Now this doesn’t always apply to every post but some you may want to go back and check. And you don’t want to forget, because say 3 years later, someone could find it. It’s been superseded by new regulations. It’s out of date. So put a review date.
And then you can reuse it. Now you have a record to go back and you can recycle and you can do this systematically. But ways of reusing that content.
One, How about, once it’s been added to your site, maybe a month later, 2 months later, why not republish it in full on LinkedIn Pulse. So on LinkedIn effectively. Then a couple of weeks later, republish it on Medium.
Now Medium is huge. They have massive massive traffic. Way more than you’ll ever ever dream of getting on your post, on your own site. Unless of course you are Huffington Post.
Misunderstanding of Duplicate Content
So you may be thinking at this point, oh but that’s duplicate content. No it isn’t. Now a lot of us misunderstand duplicate content.
Duplicate content generally is the same content on your own website. And in similar things, some people just keep a little bunch of blogs and just put the same stuff everywhere.
But google is clever. It knows. And if you setup your blog in the right way, yes set it up correctly. Not as obvious as you think. Google will know that yours is the original and that these come afterwards.
So you are not necessarily doing this for ranking, you are doing this for traffic. Yeah bring them in, give a good thing, a good message to get them back to your website.
Another one is you can record a little video summary of that post. You can put that on YouTube. You can put this in Facebook. If you do a 15 second one, you can put it in Instagram. You can put it in Pinterest.
You can put it anywhere linking back to that post. That is reusing that post, this is new traffic to the post but it’s bringing it back again.
You could write a Facebook post. Referencing that one and link to that post. You can also write an update to that post. You can write a new introductory paragraph. Then say something and update it, then the rest of it is the same.
Then just hit the publish again and then it will republish with a new publishing date to the front of your blog. And again you can then tell people, ‘Hey remember a great post I wrote a while ago, this has been updated. You might want to check the new one out.’
And when you do these, record when you did it in that spreadsheet. If you use a tool such as Edgar, it’s Meet Edgar which we use, then you can put these posts, link to them in a library, and then it will publish on social media, and every now and again it will bring it out in social media and bring new eyes to that post.
This is easy. Well this is a lot easier than it sounds. This really is simple.
So this means you could perhaps write once a week, once every 2 weeks. And then in between, you can push more effort to other ones.
So you write a new post about something, you can link to the old one. And say, ‘for more information we wrote a while ago about this.’ It’s all good. And it is even better if you can record which are the most, the best performing ones, which are then the better ones; so use your google Analytics.
Which performed best, got the most views, got the most rank. Then you re-purpose those, rather than all of them.
Just takes a bit of thinking. Anyway, I think you get the gist.
And by the way if you think, ‘Oh gosh Jon with your spreadsheets and everything, you are all so perfect.’
No we are not. We just recently, we thought we had this, and we just actually paid someone on Fiverr to go through our entire blog and re reference the entire lot because we thought we had it. And no we didn’t. We kept the spreadsheet up to a point and then forgot. So happens to all of us.
Drive Time Podcast
Finally it is a Thursday. Time for a Drive Time Podcast. This doesn’t need any introduction, but “Social Media Marketing Podcast” with “Mike Stelzner” from Social Media Examiner.
This is a weekly podcast. Mike Stelzner is entirely OCD about everything. That means everything he does is brilliant, and so well executed. Well worth your time.
Go listen to that. You will enjoy it, I guarantee it. If it’s not on your podcast listening, you’ve got to go try it. I think you will enjoy it. Alright.
I’ll be back with another tip very soon.
