Drowning in Content Creation? 4 Tips for Maintaining a Healthy Online Content Strategy Without Losing Your Mind
by Josette Millar
It’s inevitable. You set up your online content strategy and suddenly find yourself overcome by ideas or by your complete lack of them. Suddenly, that easy and friendly strategy is a burgeoning beast, bent on consuming all your time and effort. Before tearing up your passwords or completely losing your mind, use these four tips to maintain a healthy online content strategy.
Schedule Your Time
An online content strategy is not complete without a basic editorial calendar for production. Whether it’s just forecasting a week ahead that breaks down time and effort or a whole year planned beforehand for producing top content, having a basic guideline of what and where you will spend your time in content production is a must. It prevents blog posts from being posted months apart because that responsibility was set on the back burner and it also stops hours of obsessing over creating an article.To ensure that you produce relevant and consistent content, set up an editorial calendar.
Delegate What You Can
There’s some content that is simply impossible to delegate but for most business owners, getting other employees to help with online content strategy can not only reduce your own obligations but create better content. Interns or younger employees may have a better grasp on the intricacies of social media sites. Utilizing their expertise helps decrease overall time spent on social media. Employees from each department may have a different perspectives and knowledge sets that can be turned into surprising and informative content. A final approval before posting can prevent any faux pas and free your time for more pressing tasks. Don’t take the yoke solely upon yourself when it comes to online content. Share the responsibility to produce the best content possible.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Even a well-planned online content strategy can devolve into stale content. Often, those who are producing content think that each post and article needs to be a separate and independent entity from the rest. Not so! In fact, some of the most successful writers reuse and recycle content, changing the intended audience or slightly altering the message. Take a cue from any magazine and find new angles on your old articles. Read through old articles and pick out places where you can delve further into a subject, spin it into another article, or even provide your audience with an update.
Find More Platforms
If you’re only posting to a company blog and social media sites, you’re missing huge swaths of your potential audience. No matter how fantastic your site, most consumers will simply never stumble across it. Becoming proactive about your content is a great way to spread your company message, increase your audience, and get more benefits from a single article or infographic. Many blogs and magazines are struggling for content and looking for guest bloggers or authors to communicate with their audience. Search out sites that are looking for content and offer to have your article hosted on their site. This not only increases the number of eyes on your message but will increase search engine rankings by having your name and content appear more regularly.
Creating an effective online content strategy requires more than just a great plan. Successful businesses need to use their resources, plan their time, and network to get their name and message out on as many platforms as necessary. By putting these four tips into effect, implementing your online content strategy into action should require little time and minimal stress.