At Strategic Communications, blogging is a big part of what we do, both for ourselves and for our clients. A robust, well-managed blog is a key element of any content creation strategy. As we’ve discussed in the past, quality content is a must when driving traffic to your site. Blogs are a great vehicle for this.
Obviously, part of implementing an effective blogging strategy require developing quality content for the blog. Assuming you’ve got quality content, your blog posts can serve as a great starting point for repurposing content across a variety of channels. Here are some of the things that we do to leverage the value of our, and our clients’ blog content:
Post to the Website
Once we develop a quality blog, we start out by posting it to our website or the website of one of our clients. Simple enough.
Promote the Post
Once we’ve got our blog out there, we’ll drive traffic to it by taking advantage of a variety of channels, especially social media. We can pull copy from the blog post itself to use in social media, and include a link to the blog post, along with an image.
LinkedIn Pulse
While LinkedIn Pulse isn’t delivering the results it once was, it’s still a good way to reach new audiences with your content. A few days after we’ve posted a blog to our own, or a client’s website, we’ll follow up with a LinkedIn long form blog post through LinkedIn and we’ll tag it with some words and phrases that we hope will position it well to get picked up by one or more Pulse channels. Additionally, we’ll post across social media channels with a link back to the blog post — share, like, retweet, etc. using all available outlets to gain social media traction.
Leverage the Content
Once you create or purchase content, it’s yours; and it’s an asset we feel you should take full advantage of. We do this in multiple ways. We pull sections from blog posts to include in monthly e-letters — these shorter summaries also include a link back to the original blog post. Sometimes we’ll pull together various blog posts into longer whitepapers or e-books. Depending on the topic, and amount of interest it has generated, we may pitch the topics as contributed content to various media outlets based on our clients’ target audiences. This content can also be used as the basis for infographics, podcasts and even video clips.
As you can see, a lot of our blogging process revolves around getting content out in front of our audiences. That means both promoting the content through a variety of channels, such as social media, and continuing to leverage that content so it doesn’t just go away after one use.
Our motto: create once and use multiple times; that’s the best way to ensure that you’re getting the most value out of your content creation efforts. Need help developing and implementing a content marketing strategy to fuel your business results? We can help.
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
Tags: blogging best practices, content management, content marketing, ebooks, LinkedIn Pulse, Marketing, podcasting, repurposing content, small business blogging, Social Media, video, whitepapers