There’s a phrase I’ve heard a few times: “As worthless as yesterday’s Racing Form.” If you’ve never been initiated to the world of horse racing, a Daily Racing Form is published each day that gives information and odds about all the horses running on that day. Of course, the next day its information has no value at all.
Many content creators have the same problem. Each day they work hard to create something relevant, but they don’t take time to employ any strategies that milk additional long-term value from the content they create.
We use content marketing to get followers, leads, and customers. Ultimately we want some real world contact information, like an email address or phone number. Here are several easy ways to squeeze every penny of value out of the content you create.
Building Blocks
Don’t use a scattergun approach to your content creation; use a building block approach. Invest a good chunk of time developing an editorial calendar. You’re going to build this editorial calendar backwards from your ultimate goal, which is creating an eBook. Your process should go something like this:
- Select a big hairy topic for your eBook. Make it something that will engage your audience.
- Divide that big topic into five to 10 subtopics; these will become white papers.
- Break those subtopics into bite-sized, or rather blog-sized chunks. This is the content you’ll be creating on a regular basis.
Looking forward at this process, you’ll create a series of blogs. Combining those blogs creates white papers, which you can use to promote lead gathering. Finally, by combining several of those white papers – and adding an introduction and conclusion – you have an eBook, which you can use for lead gathering or perhaps even offer it for sale.
Don’t Forget Infographics
Infographics really command the eyeballs. They definitely need to be part of your strategy. There’s an easy way to plan infographics and get the most value from them.
When you’re doing your editorial calendar, note the blog topics that will lend themselves to being translated into an infographic. Write the blog first and then a few weeks later, publish the infographic on the same topic. Your readers won’t see it as redundant; they’ll view it as reinforcing…if the read the original blog.
Further, when you put together your eBook, you can reuse this infographic to illustrate the blog that you’re including in your eBook. You might want to use it in your white paper as well. Now you have used one blog idea in four powerful content settings.
Advanced Content Squeezing
So far almost everything we’ve discussed is built from a series of blogs and doesn’t require much work once the original blogs are written – perhaps a little editing and a few additional paragraphs. However, if you want to get even more value out of your content, consider turning your white papers/eBooks into SlideShare presentations and webinars.
If you’ve created some infographics along the way, you have much of the SlideShare work complete. Next, taking SlideShare presentations and adapting them to webinars isn’t a huge jump either. Need I mention videos and podcasts?
Phew, is it Over?
No, it’s not over. After you have gone through this process a few times, you’ll have a veritable library of excellent content. If your topics are sufficiently evergreen, you can circle back around every couple of years and start reposting the material with a few updates.
Find the best ways to combine this great content with calls to action, and you’ll experience fantastic growth with minimal effort. Let your competitors do it the hard way.
Images: ”squeeze lemon juice on hand for the black background/ Shutterstock.com“
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