Maximising the value of your content (without being penalised by Google)
Content strategy is all about creating engaging, relevant, informative content for a variety of objectives, including better user experience, demonstrating expertise, search engine optimisation, and maintaining a presence through things like social media and email marketing. Taking the time to work on that content and making it good (human-written pieces, not that AI stuff!) is an investment in your business and while you should think of it as time well-spent and a valuable marketing activity, you can maximise that investment if you repurpose content across different media.
I’m not talking about writing a blog and then sharing it on social media. You can be cleverer than that.
Think of your piece of content as a core asset and from this asset, you can create multiple pieces that build on its value without adding a lot of extra work. Consider the different ways you can express the same points and details, and how that can work across different media.
For example, you might write a blog post on a topic relevant to your business such as ‘how to eat more healthily’. Beyond posting it on your website and sharing it to Facebook or Instagram, you can create a suite of content that provides you with sharing opportunities over a sustained period.
Here are several ideas you can use to create new resources from your original asset:
- A visual carousel for each healthy eating tip
- Add items to your FAQs [I always recommend including FAQs on your site]
- A series of tease tweets on Twitter
- An elaboration piece focusing on one of the ideas
- A follow up piece on how to avoid unhealthy foods, based on similar information but exploring the converse
- A discussion topic on LinkedIn
- A poll on LinkedIn
- An article featuring the same points but structured differently
- Inclusion in an email newsletter
- An infographic using a template from tools such as Canva
- Further blog posts based around the ideas of the post, for example ‘Why eat healthily?’, ‘Are you eating as healthily as you think you are?’, ‘Easy ways to include more healthy foods in your diet’ etc
Why bother reusing content like this?
By creating multiple posts from one central asset you are achieving economy of scale. One set of research and key point creation can produce multiple pieces of content for not a lot of extra time or effort. Creating 5 items around one idea is much less labour intensive than creating 5 different ones and you can schedule them into your marketing activities over a period of time, giving you consistent presence.
Also, people digest information in different ways. Some enjoy reading long form articles, while others like small bites of information that can be absorbed quickly. You are giving your work much bigger reach by presenting it in different formats.
Beware though: you have to stick to some basic rules
While this should make perfect, logical sense to you, there are some basic guidelines you need to adhere to:
- Make sure the core topic is interesting and relevant and meets your content objectives. Creating multiple items on flawed topics just produces several pointless posts
- Repurpose but don’t duplicate. Using your core asset to inspire multiple pieces requires less effort than creating all new ones but you still need to make each one distinct so take care to change up some of the wording and structure and include some different points or angles in different pieces. Google may well penalise you if it thinks you are just copying and pasting (Google’s first priority is original content). Plus, while separate pieces will often be targeted at slightly different audiences, some will see more than one and they need to feel they’re getting something different from each one
- Schedule sensibly over time. Done well, this can give you collateral over a sustained period but intersperse it with other content to keep your output fresh and varied.
I write a lot of blogs for one client with multiple e-commerce websites whose ranges overlap. That often that means one brief is provided for up to 5 websites. The content/information is essentially the same across all versions, but they have to be uniquely original. To facilitate this, I created a few go-to formats to present the information such as informational article pieces, ‘how to’ posts, and list based items such as ‘5 things you need to know about…’, ‘Our top 10 tips for…’, ‘FAQs about…’. Sometimes it’s a challenge for your creativity but it’s definitely a skill you can develop, the more you do.
This is where good copywriting pays dividends
This kind of endeavour is truly where great writing skills come into their own. The research and subject knowledge are one side of the coin, but the skills, adaptability, and creativity of the writer are just as important. That might be you, or it might be something you outsource to an expert. Did I mention how many blogs I write?…