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Improve Your Content Marketing ROI, Don’t Let Blog Posts Die in the Archives

Amanda Dodge Content Creation, Marketing August 5, 2020

One of the biggest challenges the content marketers face is quantifying their return on investment (ROI). As the costs of creating content increase, brands have to justify spending more for an article that a handful of people will read and likely forget. Is the cost worth the expense?

Plenty of SEO professionals will explain that quality content is an important part of ranking well and that top-notch organic rankings take time. You’re not supposed to look at each individual article, but rather the upward trend over several months.

However, it is possible to increase your content marketing ROI in the short run. You just need to stop forgetting about what you wrote after you hit the publish button. Your content can provide as much value as you want if you keep putting it to work. This guide will tell you how.

Repost Content Without Alienating Your Audiences

If you look at any of your blog post analytics, you will likely see a spike in traffic from the day you published it, followed by a few small bumps in the months following. Unless that page ranks well in the SERPs, you’re not going to drive a ton of traffic unless you keep sharing it online and promoting it in your other marketing channels.

This creates a problem for marketers. They want to repost content on social media, but any fans that follow your page closely will be turned off by the stale content.

“You know that guy who tells the same story at every party, and everyone tunes out as soon as he starts talking?” Michelle C y ca asks at Hootsuite. “That’s how your audience feels when you repeat content—like they’d rather be elsewhere.”

The key is to be strategic about it. For example, if a food blogger curates a list of the best donut places in town, they can easily annoy customers by posting the same article four times over the course of three weeks. This is the type of reposting that customers hate and expert social media managers avoid.

However, if that blogger needs a social post and it happens to be National Doughnut Day, then they can easily share the article, especially if it hasn’t been posted in a while. Not only is this repost option relevant, but it is also more effective. The target audience is likely looking for a good donut to celebrate the day, and the blogger provides valuable resources that readers can act on.

To apply this to your brand, look ahead at national holidays and events that are coming up. (This is also a great way to fill in your social media editorial calendar.) Consider which events would pair well with the blog content you have previously written. You can also keep an eye on industry and national news to create brand tie-ins. This allows you to repost content effectively and after a period when most people have already forgotten about the piece.

Don’t Neglect Your Internal Links

Even if you never share your blog posts on social media, you can still make them work for you as you publish fresh content. It is easy to forget about the power of internal linking from both an SEO and user experience perspective.

“Google finds your posts and pages best when they’re linked to from somewhere on the web,” Meike Hendriks writes at Yoast. “Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value.”

When Google crawls your pages, it looks at both the internal and external links. These links help the search engine “read” your content. For example, it can better categorize the topics covered by the external links. In this case, I have linked to industry experts in the SEO and social media fields. Internal links help group your content into similar buckets. Google can better understand how one piece of content relates to another and how both pieces tie into your brand as a whole.

Of course, any good SEO strategy will also have a human element behind it. Internal links keep people clicking to other pages on your site. They provide background information to the main story or elaborate on an idea that you only have time to briefly touch on. Internal links can drive down your bounce rates and drive up your average time on site as users explore your content and learn more about what you have to say.

Every website has its own guidelines for internal linking. However, a few common best practices include:

Limit the number of internal links to a reasonable range, typically between 2-5 per post.
Keep the anchor text close to the target keyword on the page you are linking to. (Some websites want the exact keyword to be the anchor text.)
Let internal links flow naturally within the body of the article. Don’t try to stuff them in if they don’t seem relevant to the rest of the piece.

You can always go back and add internal links where they are useful. If you regularly publish content without internal links, you may want to audit old posts to add them in.

Get Your Content Into the Hands of Your Sales Team

In complex B2B industries – and particularly for SaaS teams – sales departments spend a good amount of time explaining how their products work and why they are needed. They have to start with the most basic industry questions and need to be ready to answer anything. This knowledge is what separates an effective salesperson from the dozens of others you meet at conferences or networking events.

As a marketer, you can help your sales team. You can provide clear answers and information so they don’t have to go into detail with customers each time. You can also create persuasive materials that win customers over as they crawl through your sales funnel. Plus, this adds elements of expertise to your company. The client doesn’t have to take the salesperson’s word for it, they can learn more about the nature of your industry on your blog.

Review your content to see what materials can help your sales representatives close deals. Identify gaps in the information and place them on your content calendar. This makes your content a greater asset to the company and gives you ideas for the future.

Plus, there is no easier way to increase your content marketing ROI than to make it an essential part of the sales closing process.

Build Content Marketing ROI Into Your Ideation Process

Too many companies create blog content because they think it is an SEO silver bullet or because someone told them to at a conference or on a webinar. As a result, they publish posts and then forget about them. Publish and forget. Publish and forget – at least until something goes viral. However, you can start to plan your blog posts with your content marketing ROI in mind.

Consider which posts you would link to as you develop content during the ideation process. Make a note of any important days or notable events in advance so you can plan to reshare the posts. Fill in gaps in the content you have already created. This will take careful planning at first but will start to come naturally over time.

You will always have some blog posts that drive a higher content marketing ROI than others. However, if you keep driving traffic to your pages and getting the most out of your pages as a whole, then the value you get from your marketing budget will always be on the rise.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

It’s Okay to Use the First Person in Your Professional Blog Content

Amanda Dodge Branding, Content Creation March 2, 2020

As you start to develop your brand and blog style guide, you may become conflicted over the narrative voice that you want to use. Does jumping into the first person seem too informal? Should you even reference yourself in a professional blog, or is that too casual? These are common questions that I often answer when working with clients for the first time.

Spoiler alert: You can see where I stand on the issue. I believe there is a time and place for using I/we as long as it matches your brand goals.

This post will focus on the different narrative voices that you can choose for your branded blog. It will cover why some companies limit writers to the third-person and the pros and cons of using each. Finally, it will empower you to choose your narrative voice, whether it is the first-person, second-person, or all three.

Know Your Points of View

Let’s take a step back to grammar school and review the different points of view that you can choose for your writing. You have three main options:

First person: we recommend following the industry best practices… our clients have benefitted from…
Second person: if you are considering… the best choice for your brand is…
Third person: small business owners who need… if they find themselves lacking… their best option is…

As the team at ACM training explain:

“The first person (me) puts the writer centre stage. The second puts the reader (you) in the spotlight. And the third views things from an audience’s point of view (he, she, they) – way up in the cheap seats at the back of the auditorium if you like.”

Bloggers as a whole are split on which forms of voice are best. While some think the third person is the best option professionally, others think it is too formal. Meanwhile, other writers suggest avoiding the first person unless it is used to position the writer as a position of authority.

Consider what Georgy Cohen of MeetContent has to say:

“I believe the use of first-person is a privilege. It connotes a truth, an intimacy, an authentic perspective, and thus a power unlike any other. It is innately personal — in some instances confessional.”

He goes on to say that this privilege can easily be abused – and points to clickbait publications like Buzzfeed who use it as a shock-factor.

While he has a point, the first person, especially the first person plural, can be used to create a sense of community and connect a group of people. For example, the sentence: “While we try to stick to our New Year’s resolutions, many of us fail by the end of January.” is more engaging and inclusive than, “Most people can’t stick to their resolutions,” or “If you already gave up on your resolution…” It can be used to create more compassion and intimacy.

Your Age and Background May Reflect Your Narrative Choices

There are several factors that contribute to your point of view selections, including your upbringing and education. If you have an academic or journalistic background, then switching to a more colloquial writing style might seem unprofessional to you. Additionally, age may even play a factor.

One study from 2014 by the University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project (WWBP) looked at the Facebook posts of 75,000 volunteers. They found that the older you are, the less likely you are to use the first-person, preferring the third-person instead.

“When we are in new situations and are trying to establish an identity, we tend to be more self-focused, which comes out through higher rates of ‘I’-words,” social psychologist James Pennebaker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, explains. “[But as people age] we become less concerned with our own shortcomings and can sit back and watch the world a bit more objectively.”

This doesn’t mean you can shake off any request to use the third person with an “ok boomer,” response, but it may help explain why someone writes a certain way. I would also like to add that since the days of MySpace and Livejournal, the internet has favored more colloquial writing. This means that younger generations may favor the first person along with a more casual writing style because it is how they feel comfortable communicating on the web.

Your Narrative Voice Reflects Your Brand

The challenge is that we don’t always have the luxury of writing how we choose. Brand managers and marketing executives set the tone for their blogs – and that includes the point of view. Copywriters need to put aside their personal preferences to match the tone and writing style of their clients or bosses.

Your blog content reflects how you interact with your customers – and how you expect them to interact with you. Opting for a formal way of speaking and professional manner of voice may convey a sense of authority, but it doesn’t always make your brand seem approachable. While a medical office or law firm may want to seem confident in their writing, they also need to be compassionate. This creates a conflict between the blog manager and senior marketing teams, who want to connect with the target audience without losing their authoritative branding.

It is Possible (and Likely) That You Will Mix and Match Your Narrative Voice

As you develop your blog content, it is likely that some posts will focus on the second person while others use the first person. An announcement about a leadership change will likely use the first person, while a how-to guide will sway more to the second-person. Allowing your writers to determine the best voice for your blog can help them focus on the message, rather than massaging sentence structure to account for an outdated style guide.

It is also possible that you will use different tenses within the same post. For example, if you are creating a tutorial, then you may start off using the second person, but then jump into the first person to explain why you do things a certain way.

The key to success when jumping around tenses is to have guidelines for consistency. You can use whatever tense you want as long as you have a reason for it. You may switch between the second and third person to break up the synonyms and improve flow, or you may require writers to stick to one narrative style throughout one piece of content. It’s up to your brand.

Test Different Writing Styles to Find Your Brand Voice

As you publish your first few blog posts this year, work to establish your brand voice that other writers and marketers can follow. This voice should be consistent across all site copy and printed materials.

Test different writing styles that match your brand to see how your audiences react. You may find that the first person point of view is more inclusive than you realize, paving the way to make it more acceptable in your blogging.

Image by Hugo Ataide from Pixabay

How Often Should You Publish Blog Content Anyway?

Amanda Dodge Content Creation February 15, 2020

The short answer:

Most small businesses can get away with publishing blog content 2-3 times per month, or scaling up to one post weekly. This will boost their organic search efforts and give them social media content without overwhelming them.

Keep reading for the long answer

One of the most common questions that clients ask is how often they need to publish blog content. Oftentimes, this question is used to mentally evaluate what kind of budget or time commitment they will need to get their desired results. Like all things related to SEO, there is no magic number for the exact amount of posts you need to rank first in Google. Plenty of blogs publish content daily or weekly and don’t get the results they want.

Let’s look at what the experts have to say in regard to blog post frequency to determine how often you should publish blog content.

How Often Should You Publish for Good SEO?

The main reason why blog owners try to publish a certain number of times per week is to boost their search rankings. They want to keep an active blog and increase their daily traffic and keyword quality. However, the frequency with which you publish blog content does not have any impact on your search results.

Chris Lee at RankXL explains that while publishing less often doesn’t hurt your SEO, it can limit your growth. He uses his own website as an example: if he publishes content once per month, he isn’t slowing his growth, but his site will take longer to grow than another one that publishes twice per week. Twelve posts versus 104 posts over the course of the year is a significant difference and the latter blog will have had more opportunities to drive traffic and rank well.

It is more important that you post high-quality content on your site that keeps people checking on your blog instead of sticking to an arbitrary posting amount in hopes of winning over Google’s favor.

It is Better to Publish and Promote Than to Overpublish

You do not need to post every day and you do not need to keep up with some mythical amount of posts to grow your business. Instead, look at how you plan to promote your blog content and determine when people will be interested in your content.

Dries Cronje wrote a fantastic piece for Smartblogger on why posting every day is a terrible idea. His premise is simple: your audiences don’t care what you have to say every day. You are not the Huffington Post or the New York Times. There are very few things that you have to talk about that will attract customers daily.

If you publish content five times per week, then you need to command the attention of your social media following each one of those times to visit those pages.

You have to highlight the content in an email blast and hope your audience clicks on multiple links.

Your marketing efforts will become solely focused on driving traffic to your blog instead of promoting your actual products or services.

Instead, consider the benefits of posting weekly. You can feature the blog in a weekly email, schedule a few social media posts around one piece, and then use your free time to highlight the amazing work you do. You will get more traffic to one high-quality piece instead of spreading it across five average posts.

Post at a Frequency Where You Won’t Burn Out

Blog burnout is a very real issue that content marketers face. They set high expectations for posting every week (or even multiple times per week) and then quickly feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they need to create. At any given point in the week, they are writing, editing, publishing, or brainstorming ideas for various posts. It becomes incredibly easy to fall behind or skip your blog content entirely.

It is better to start out at a slower pace, posting only a few times per month, than to have to pull back or pause your blog content because you have run out of energy, ideas, or time to get work done.

Don’t Stop Publishing During Your Busy Season

Your frequency also depends on the ebbs and flows of your workload. We’ve all had weeks where we don’t have the time or energy to complete everything on our to-do lists. More often than not, it’s the blog content that gets cut. A company will go a week or two without posting, which will then turn into a month or two without posting.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for companies to experience a roller coaster publishing schedule where they only publish one article per month, then go dark for three months, and then suddenly publishes four posts within a few weeks. This will negatively impact any following that you have.

There are a few ways you can prevent this content roller coaster from tearing through your blog:

Make sure you can handle your blog workload. Either hire someone to manage your blog or carve out a specific amount of time to work on content.
Schedule content ahead of busy times. If you know that a certain month or quarter is busier than the rest of the year, schedule content a few months out so the blog functions on autopilot.
Pull back on your publishing schedule without completely shutting down. It is better to reduce your posts from twice weekly to weekly publishing than to completely give up on posting for a month or two.

Even if you don’t have a busy season, a vacation or internal deadline can completely derail your editorial calendar. Try to anticipate and plan for this ahead of time when possible.

Start Small and Scale Your Publishing Efforts

If you recently launched a website with a blog, or have just started your content marketing initiatives, start with a publishing schedule that you know you can handle. Test out your content creation efforts for the first three months and get into a habit of writing, editing, and publishing.

If you can’t make it through the first 10 blog posts without delaying a publish date or scrambling to get something live, then you need to adjust your frequency.

Once you get into a groove and feel like you can publish more often, start to scale your efforts. Add a few more posts each month or increase the length of your blog content. Test to see how your improved content boosts your traffic and organic rankings.

One more thing: if you decide to work with an outside contractor to help you publish blog content, remember that managing them takes time, too. Set aside a set number of hours per week to review their work, provide feedback, and talk about strategy moving forward. This is especially important if this contractor is working with your brand for the first time. You may know certain industry terms and best practices, but they might not. However, once this person knows what is expected of them, they will be able to create better content at a faster pace.

Publish at a Rate That Works of You

Some brands need to publish weekly (or multiple times per week) in order to stay competitive. These are typically either larger companies with a big social media following or brands that have constant news and updates they need to send out. However, if you are just posting evergreen content (blog content that isn’t tied to a particular timeline), then you likely don’t need to keep up with the rates that “SEO gurus” expect.

Start small and scale up – or down – depending on what you can handle. You will reap more benefits from publishing high-quality content consistently than by haphazardly posting whenever you have free time.

Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay

How to Use an Editorial Calendar to Improve Social Media Management

Amanda Dodge Content Creation, Social Media January 28, 2020

One of the biggest challenges that companies have with social media marketing is maintaining a consistent presence. They will go through periods where they post daily and work to engage with other accounts, only to go dark for a month or longer. Because social media is a top-funnel marketing tactic, it is rarely attributed to direct sales. This means it is often one of the first things to get cut from the budget or from your team’s to-do list.

Burnout is also a real issue for social media managers. Coming up with creative content day-in and day-out can exhaust anyone, causing marketing managers to post fewer updates and skip days here or there.

Fewer social media updates mean lower engagement rates. Social media algorithms use the snowball effect to promote brands. I’ve worked with clients where their posts received unprecedented engagement rates on an average post just because an image or video shared a few days prior went viral. Brands with high engagement rates will continue to get the exposure they want while inconsistent brands will start back at the beginning every time they take a break.

Fortunately, you don’t have to constantly fight burnout and dedicate several hours per week to social media content creation. With a clear editorial calendar, you can quickly fill up your work and ensure that you have content even during the busiest times in your office.

This guide will walk you through the editorial calendar creation process and provide tips for easier management and delegation.

1. Find an Editorial Calendar that Works for You

There are dozens of companies that are dying to give you an editorial calendar template. You can download these for free and use them at face value, or you can modify the templates for your own needs. You can find two popular editorial calendar tools at HubSpot and CoSchedule.

Decide what kind of template works for your brand. Some people will embrace a clean spreadsheet while others will want a more traditional calendar view. A calendar view will also give you visual cues to make sure that your content isn’t too cluttered together or certain themes aren’t posted too far apart. Personally, I prefer a hybrid. I am a visual learner, so I prefer to have a calendar that I can glance at to see what content is going live and when. However, I also use a spreadsheet to reduce clutter, make it easy to grab information and allow multiple people to collaborate at once.

Below is the calendar view that we will work with throughout this article, using September 2019 as the sample month:

2. Look for Major Holidays and Events

Once you have an editorial calendar, start with the easy days. Block out Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, or whatever major holidays fall on that month. What posts will you need for these days – both before and during the holiday? Will the office be closed? Would you like to honor the holiday?

Below is an example of a content note for Labor Day, which falls on the first Monday of September.

Outside of national holidays (where banks and schools are closed), there are also lesser holidays that many companies celebrate on social media. IHOP promotes Pancake Day while Dunkin lures customers in on National Donut Day. Even if your company doesn’t offer a special deal based on a holiday, you can still use these minor events to create quick, image-heavy social media content. Below are a few holiday examples for September.

You can take these holidays as lightly or as seriously as you want. For a cheeky post, you can encourage employees to leave the office and take a long lunch on National Cheeseburger Day, or you can use an event like Business Women’s Day to highlight unequal pay in the workplace.

3. Promote Your Blog Content

As a copywriter, I am always begging my clients to promote their blog content on social media. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website and share the content that your team worked so hard to create. Plus, if you create blog content consistently, then you should always have something to share on social media.

As you can see, our editorial calendar example is updated to share blog content that is published twice per month.

You have two options when reposting blog content on social media. First, you can post your top posts. These pages have a history of success and will likely generate higher engagement rates. However, you can also repost content that wasn’t as successful when it went live. This can give it fresh life and drive new people to read it. You work hard to create your blog content – don’t waste it.

If you focus on evergreen blog post ideas, then you can continue to share blog content several months after it goes live.

4. Schedule Throwback Days

There’s a reason why #ThrowbackThursday has more than 49 million tags on Instagram. Looking back on where you came from compared to where you are now is exciting – in both your personal life and as a brand. You can apply the principles of Throwback Thursday to your social media calendar – even if you’re not posting on a Thursday.

This option is particularly popular for brands with a long history that can share old photos or companies that have grown significantly in the past few years.

5. Develop a Content Series

As you can see, your editorial calendar is starting to fill up. Even before you create a social media post, a third of your days already have content planned out.

Your next step is to come up with a series that fits the month to develop content around.

For example, September is Self Improvement Month, which several brands can create social media posts around. A local gym could post health tips or an office could create content focused around growing professionally.

A few common series that brands rely on to fill their social media editorial calendars include:

Employee spotlights
Customer profiles or testimonials
Top tips or hacks
Countdowns to certain events
Definitions of industry jargon
Behind the scenes peeks

You can create a series that lasts a few weeks (like a five-day countdown), or one that lasts several months. You can also create content for the series all at once and then schedule out the posts, helping you save time over the course of the month or year.

6. Leave Space for Breaking News

There will be a few spaces on your calendar that you can save for last-minute posts and emergencies. There are also times when your brand shouldn’t post. As Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Bahamas in September, brands like Royal Caribbean needed to clear their social media channels so they weren’t offering cheap deals to the affected areas. They also needed to use the space to talk about their part in the relief efforts.

Leave two or three days where you can pause your content (or move it to a different day) to post relevant information as needed. You never know when a throwback post will get replaced with breaking news.

Try to make your “free days” on less popular social days for your brand. I used the weekend as an example of when your company can afford to go dark if nothing comes up during the month.

7. Create a Spreadsheet for Industry Content

Just by following this process you can fill up the vast majority of your editorial calendar before the month even starts. From here, you only have a week or two that you need to come up with content for. Instead of using your creative energy to create 30 days of content, you only need to fill in 10 days.

I recommend keeping a spreadsheet or Google doc with interesting content, links, images, videos, memes, or anything else that would be interesting for your brand. You can also share this document with others in your marketing team (or company as a whole) to add to. Then, you can pull from this list to create engaging content.

How to Use a List-Based Editorial Calendar

At the start of the article, I mentioned how you might use a spreadsheet to create content instead of a calendar. For the sake of example, here is what a list format would look like, using the first few days of September.

Once you know what the post is going to be, you can write in the copy, start pulling relevant images, and collect necessary links to go with the post.

Pro Tip: you can also use this list to report on the success of your social content. Create tabs listing the impressions, likes, comments, and shares for each post, which you can fill in after the content goes live. Then you can see what content your audience loves and what content they hate. This way you can always keep improving.

Create Content and Schedule it Ahead

Social media is (and always will be) a daily activity for your marketing team. However, you can plan ahead to limit the amount of work it takes each day.

Following this process, you can draft 30 social media posts for the month in just a few hours. You can save the content and post it as needed, or use tools like Buffer to schedule the content out. If you choose this option, continue to monitor your posts. Check the content when it is supposed to go live, respond to comments or questions, and stay engaged on your channels.

Just because you can create dozens of social media posts in just a few hours doesn’t mean your social media management is reduced to a monthly activity.

An editorial calendar is meant to help you take control of your social media channels to prevent burnout and maintain consistency. When used well, it will provide you with a clear plan where you always have something in your queue to keep your audience engaged.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay