Everyone and their mother knows at this point that you need SEO to be seen online. However, with everyone optimizing their content to the nth degree, it can quickly become apparent that you need something else to boost yourself up above the competition.
After all, if you’re a site that sells coffee and you’re trying to dominate the search term “how to use a french press,” you’re going to naturally be up against some pretty stiff competition. Simply making an article on your company blog, optimizing it for SEO, and throwing in a few hyperlinks to quality resources , while good, won’t necessarily cut it anymore.
If you find that your online content strategy isn’t producing the level of results you were hoping for, here are a few tips and tricks to help you increase both the quantity of content you produce, its overall effectiveness, and your own productivity as you oversee it all.
1. Plan, Plan, Plan
If you don’t already plan your content, you should start doing so immediately. Simply trying to come up with fresh, relevant content every day is a surefire way to run out of steam on a regular basis. Instead, take the time to carefully plan out your upload schedule. This can be done in a few different ways:
- Schedule: The most obvious tip is to schedule your content. If you post five things on Facebook in a day and then nothing for a week, you’re going to frustrate your audience with the inconsistency. Take stock of the content you have available, what’s new, and what is going to be reposted or shared from other sources. Then schedule each post into your greater marketing plan.
- Diversify: Along with scheduling, it’s important to diversify your content. Write blog posts on your company blog, submit guest posts for other publications, compose emails for your email list, and post on social media. This allows you to build an omnichannel strategy that reaches your customers from different touchpoints.
- Specialize: While diversification is important, it’s also critical that you balance this out with a focus on the content platforms that provide the greatest bang for your buck. For instance, if you run an Etsy shop that sells jewelry, you’re going to want to utilize Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook (all of which are image-heavy) in your promotion. Maintaining a Twitter account (which is text-focused), on the other hand, may not be worth the time or effort.
As you consider your schedule and content options, you can craft a plan that will allow you to maximize your efforts and avoid spending time creating or promoting content in areas that will have minimal effect.
2. Aim to Engage
While it’s important that your content is authoritative and search engine optimized, it’s also essential that you create your online content with an eye towards engagement. Everyone has a website, a blog, and numerous social media channels these days, which is why you need your content to do more. You need your content to deliver a memorable experience.
A quality digital experience should be focused on generating user-engagement with your brand — engagement that is ultimately designed to lead the user towards your products or services as an answer to their problems.
While this may sound like a suggestion that leads to even more thoughtful work as you craft each piece of content, remember that the goal here is to manage your content productively. If you create mass amounts of content at an efficient rate, but none of it is optimized for an inviting, satisfying user-experience, you’re going to need to work that much harder to see results.
Focusing on creating quality content that provides a good digital experience is an excellent way to get the best results out of each piece of content that you produce.
3. Stay Connected
If you’re going to focus on content that is honed for a quality user experience, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re also available to answer questions and respond to engagement whenever it takes place.
This can happen in a variety of different ways. If you post a question on social media, invite website visitors to ask questions via email, or promote the fact that you value providing good customer service, you’re going to want to be ready to respond to inquiries in a timely manner.
One key to productively managing your content, then, is maintaining a connection to your online marketing channels at all times. Set up notifications so that you’re aware of any time a customer sends an email, posts on your social accounts, or uses any other point of contact.
It can also be helpful to get a phone with hotspot capabilities in order to use your laptop to type longer responses and access hard-to-reach files even when you’re away from home.
4. Have Users Generate Content For You
Along with creating your own content, you can also tap into a large amount of already existing engagement-oriented content by utilizing a social media aggregator on your website.
Embedding an aggregator onto your site can enable you to effortlessly gather user-generated content from all over the web, organize it, and then display it to your website’s visitors. This can provide a tangible, customer-centric stream of content that reinforces your brand to prospective customers — and all without needing to generate any original content in the process.
5. Hire Help
Finally, don’t forget about the gig economy. If you’re trying to up your content creation game without burning yourself out in the process, it can be helpful to hire a freelancer or two in order to help you with the grunt work.
By all means, make your plans, schedule your content, and explore ways that will make it more engagement-focused. However, when it comes to producing the content itself, hopping onto a site like Upwork or Fivver can give you access to an infinite stream of quality talent. Social media experts, SEO writers, and marketers can be found aplenty, all ready to help you in small, affordable bursts whenever you need them.
6. Managing Your Content Wisely
While the basic tenets of online marketing content — things like SEO or regularly posting on social media — are important to follow, sometimes you need a little more juice to help your marketing efforts really take off.
Making a solid content plan, focusing on engagement, and using either freelancers or your own audience to help with the content creation itself are all excellent ways to boost your productivity, enabling you to manage your site’s content both effectively and efficiently.
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