Lacy BoggsToday I want to talk to you about managing your content flow. Because having an editorial calendar for your blog is great, but you’ve got other content to produce too.
What I mean by content flow is all the other content you have to produce in addition to your blog post. This could be Facebook posts, tweets, guest blogging, articles you’re writing for traditional media — any other content you have to produce has to be part of your content flow. And I see a lot of my clients getting bogged down and confused because they don’t know how to make it all work.
Have a content plan
So the first and most important rule I can give you is to have a plan. Now this is bigger than your blog’s plan, so you might want to add another tab to your blog editorial calendar. Or keep it somewhere else, whatever is convenient for you. But have a plan for what you’re going to post every day of the week.
So if we’re talking about Facebook you might decide that Mondays you post a quote, and Tuesdays you post a tip-of-the-week, Wednesdays you promote your current post, Thursdays you share something from somebody else that’s wonderful, and Fridays you post a funny picture. Whatever it is, there’s no right or wrong way to do this. You have to experiment to find out what works for your audience. But having a plan and knowing what you’re going to post makes it a lot easier to come up with the content when you need it.
Become a content curator
The second most important part is to have a source for all that exciting content you’re going to share. So, part of being a content creator these days is being a content curator. So that means sharing important information, fun posts, great blog posts from other people that you find on the web. You want to become an idea curator for your audience – so that they look to you as a trusted source for information.
Include guest blogging and other media in your plan
My third tip for you is to add your guest blogging and any other media you have write for to your schedule. So when you’re creating your blog editorial calendar you’re telling yourself “I’m going to write this blog once a week, I’m going to write it twice a week, I’m going to write it once a month,” whatever your schedule is.
But what you need to remember is that you still have to create that other content too. So, you need to work guest blogging into your schedule. If you know that you only have four hours a week to work on blogging, or two hours a week to work on blogging, you’re going to have to work extra blogging into your schedule.
This also goes for if you have to write advertisements for websites or traditional media, if you’re contributing articles to magazines or other traditional media, if you’re doing interviews, if you’re doing podcasts – all of that needs to go in your content creation schedule. So I like to put it right in my blogging calendar because I just want to look one place for everything I have to do.
Now, one easy way to make this work for you is that when you do have guest blogs maybe you don’t create a new post specifically for your site that week. By that I mean, maybe there’s a new post on your site that gives a little teaser intro and a link to your guest post rather than an entirely new post. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel…which is tip #4.
Have a plan to repurpose your content.
So tip number four is to repurpose your content. What I mean by that is we never want to reinvent the wheel every time we need some new content. Because we’ll just burn ourselves out that way. It’s much much simpler to try to repurpose great content. So if you’re writing something really epic don’t just post it once. Use it again and again and again.
So, some examples of how you might do this – It could mean that you use an app or a plug-in that tweets old posts automatically for you. It could be that every Thursday is Throwback Thursday on Facebook and you post an old blog post that’s still relevant.
It could be even something bigger than that where you write a really epic post and turn it into a video presentation, or talking points for a podcast you’re going to be a part of, or a slideshare presentation. So you’re actually sharing it on multiple channels. That way you’re getting the most out of your unique ideas and thought-leadership. Because there are people that want to consume your information in the written form, and there are people who would much prefer to watch a video like this one, or listen to a podcast or watch a slideshare presentation – so you’re appealing to different demographics the more often you repurpose it.
You could do an inforgraphic, you could do all sorts of things. So when you’ve written something truly epic – when you’ve put time and sweat and tears into creating that epic content – don’t use it just once. Figure out different ways to repurpose it again and again and again. So you don’t have to be putting the pressure on yourself to create that huge epic content every time you post a blog.
Now I’d like to know: Which of these three video tips has been the most helpful for you? (You can watch number one and number two here.)
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