“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” Seth Godin
If you want your online business to succeed, you have to invest in content marketing. But, with uncertain times ahead and online competition becoming ever steeper, you need to squeeze every last drop out of your content investment. We’ll show you how.
1. Repost your content on Social Media
Don’t just post it once. Achieving organic (unpaid) engagement on social media is getting harder all the time (Hootsuite) but, with an increasing focus on trust signals and brand strength separating the wheat from the chaff online, it’s arguably never been more important. Look at your Insights and Analytics – your posts will be getting a fraction of their potential impressions so don’t be afraid to post them again.
Although there is a strong case for posting directly from within the social media platform for new updates, when it comes to uploading your entire blog back-catalogue, management tools like Meet Edgar really come into their own. Using your RSS feed, Meet Edgar enables you to upload your entire blog history and schedule items to repost at intervals of your choosing.
Our three top tips for successful reposting:
- Research the best times to post for your industry using the built in analytics platforms for each social media channel: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and LinkedIn Page Analytics, and create a schedule.
If you have a limited following and not much data to go on, you can check out one of the myriad best times to post on social media’ guides, such as these from SproutSocial and Hootsuite. - Edit the accompanying text slightly for each post so it fits in with best-practice for each platform. Facebook posts should be no longer than 80 characters, Twitter between 71 – 100 and LinkedIn no more than 25 words.
- Use hashtags, but sparingly. Check out our guide to hashtag best practice to make sure you’re getting the balance right.
2. Publish your articles directly on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is desperate for quality content. You have some. Share it.
The publishing platform on LinkedIn enables you to post full-length articles complete with styling, imagery and hashtags to help people find your content. It’s a great way to increase your own industry authority as well as that of your brand, and grossly underused by brands. Worried about duplicate content? Don’t be. In the vast majority of cases, Google will correctly identify the original source of an article (i.e. your website, not LinkedIn). To be on the safe side, though, we recommend posting your blog on LinkedIn a few days after it’s gone live on your site.
If you’re not already harnessing the power of video in your marketing, it really is time to start. If you’re there already, then make sure you’re making the most of your content investment by transforming your blogs into vlogs.
As well as using them to populate your YouTube or Vimeo channel, include the videos on your website as an alternative option for people who’d rather not read the article. Google will reward you for having a variety of media on your site and your dwell time will increase (good for overall SEO). And of course, share the video on your social media channels as well.
5. Use it as email content
Long form, evergreen articles are perfect for free downloads and whitepapers. Take one that’s a few months or even years old (if it’s truly evergreen, it won’t be out of date) and reformat it into a nice-looking pdf, or use specialist software like Designrr’s ebook-creator to make something beautiful. Promote the free download with a website Popup, a landing page (MailChimp has recently launched a simple but flexible landing page creator), on your social media channels and within your other – related – blogs.
