Creating a Blog Content Engine
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Presented at the Social Media Association Association of Michigan, this training on how to create a blog content engine will help you produce tons of blog content in no time.
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Creating a Blog Content Engine
- 1. Creating a Blog Content Engine
- 2. Hello! Nice to Meet You @MrsStrick @CrackerjackMktg #SMAMi
- 5. What is content marketing? 5
- 8. Types of Content • Written Long-Form Content – Blog Articles – eBooks – White Papers • Multimedia Content – Podcasts – Webinars – Video 8
- 9. Types of Content • Short Form – Links – Questions – Calls to Action • Visuals – Quote Badges – Infographics • Curated Content – Third party links 9
- 11. Blog: Twice a week 11
- 12. Facebook: Two to three times a day 12 Owned Content Owned Content Curated/Co-Opted Content
- 13. Twitter: Ten times a day 13 Owned Content Owned Content Owned Content Owned Content Owned Content Co-Opted Content Curated Content RT: Curated Content RT: Curated Content RT: Curated Content
- 14. LinkedIn: One to two times a day 14 Owned Content Curated Content
- 15. Pinterest: Five times a day 15
- 16. Instagram: One to five times a day 16
- 18. Holy cow! That’s a lot of content! 18
- 20. Become a content engine in 4 steps Plan Gather Organize Publish 20
- 21. PLAN
- 22. Plan: Themes, topics, alignment Theme Topic 1 Content type A Content type B Topic 2 Content type C Content themes Beyond your product or business Topics Specific titles or content ideas Content types Blog posts, podcast episodes, white papers, eBooks, events, emails, etc. 22
- 23. Beyond your content core Product or business theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme theme
- 24. Content themes 24 Make Money Using Webinars Webinar software Promoting webinars Webinar examples Webinar creation tips What does the course include Creating webinars Types of webinars What to sell via a webinar Webinars and other marketing Webinar facts & figures
- 25. Content brainstorming 25 Webinar facts, figures & examples Promoting webinars Webinar creation tips Types of webinars Top 10 webinars in 2015 Webinar stats growth infographic Successful webinar categories My favorite webinars ever A B F A J L C B G
- 26. Developing content topics • Listen to your customers • Make a list • Address every question • Research keywords • Be honest • Talk about the competition • Use the “vs.” format • Write about “the best” 26
- 27. GATHER
- 29. Your team • Monitor RSS and newsletters daily for curated content • Schedule social media updates • Engage and manage customer service via social media Community Manager • Draft, optimize and publish blog posts • Manage writers and blog calendarBlog Manager • Writing and editingWriters • Create visuals for social content, blogs, etc. • Create infographicsDesigners • Shoot and edit videoVideo Team 29
- 30. Content writers • Hire (and manage) a dedicated writer • Crowdsource content from your community (paid or unpaid – if there’s other recognition/reward) • Hire influencers/bloggers to write content for you (bonus: leverage their reach) • Hire a freelancer or agency to write and manage some or all of the above 30
- 31. Technology, tools and tidbits Long-form Content WordPress or other blogging platform (hosted on your site) Google Drive Word processing software Short-form Content RSS reader Industry newsletters Your social feeds Video YouTube Account Video camera & equipment Video editing software Visual Content Stock photo account Photoshop PicMonkey Canva eBooks & Whitepapers Slideshare (LinkedIn) Adobe Publisher Adobe Acrobat Pro Amazon Self- Publishing Collaboration, Organization & Storage DropBox Google Drive Editorial Calendar 31
- 32. ORGANIZE
- 34. Theme planning
- 35. Topics and content planning
- 37. Annual overview
- 39. Social calendars
- 41. PUBLISH
- 44. SEO • Choose a single keyword as the focus of each post – Long tail is ok! • Use the keyword in: – Your title – Early in the first paragraph – Once in an H2 header – In anchor text – Closing sentence 44
- 45. Images • Every post should have at least one image – Try for two or more • Main image • Pinterest-friendly image • Use keywords when saving your image files – This helps with SEO 45
- 46. Readership and Community • Submit to blog directories • Email newsletters • Share on social • Swap guest posts • Use aggregators – Flipboard – Stumble Upon – Reddit 46
- 47. More Practical Tips • Use your editorial calendar!!! – Note all potential topics in the “topics” tab • Jot it down as you get ideas • Keep a swipe file – Don’t let it languish • Walk away • Always preview before publishing • Get a second set of eyes 47
- 48. Keeping the Pieces Together 48
- 49. COOL TOOLS TO USE
- 51. Blog Post Title Generators 51 https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker https://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator http://seopressor.com/blog-title-generator/
- 56. Thank you! 56 Please get in touch with questions! Christina Strickland christina@crackerjackmarketing.com @mrsstrick 312-429-5588 x12
Editor's Notes
- Good morning! It’s so wonderful to see everyone here. First, let me say “Thank you to the Social Media Association of Michigan for inviting me to speak and “Thank you” to Tech Town for hosting us” I’m Christina and this picture of me is usually how you’ll find me – with a cup of coffee in my hands (or a glass of wine, depending on the time of day). I’m currently the Vice President of Crackerjack Marketing, where we specialize in social media, content and influencer marketing. If you’re on Twitter, I’d love for you to join me and Crackerjack there and use the hashtag for today’s event!
- Of course, what would any presentation be without a little shameless plug about the client’s you’ve worked with? These are just a few of my favorite clients. We’ve worked with a wide variety of B2B and B2C brands.
- According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
- One of the ways I like to think about content marketing is to think about fishing vs. farming. Social media is fishing – in other people’s streams. You can get your dinner, but it may not be sustainable, particularly if a dam is built upstream. You also need to learn to farm your own land. Cultivate your own garden, buy some cattle, build a chicken coop. This is where your blog comes in, along with other content such as white papers and email lists. While we are going to focus on your blog today, keeping with our farming vs. fishing analogy, it’s important to note that you need a balanced diet – fish as well as vegetables and meat – to survive. You need balanced marketing to survive, too.
- The word “content” can mean many things. Just like saying “I’m getting groceries” doesn’t give you all of the details, saying “Let’s create content” is pretty vague too. Mike already covered the different types of content you can create for your blog, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, here. Just a quick refresher
- These types of long form and multimedia content are all great to use on your blog.
- Most of the rest of the content types are for social media. While we ARE focusing on your blog, I just want to keep these on your radar because you can use your own blog content to create content for social media too. Curated content is basically links to other people’s content that you post in social media. We won’t be discussing this today, other than to say that when it comes to syndicating your blog content through social, it should be balanced with curated content.
- How much content you and your brand will need will vary wildly. Some brands subsist on a few evergreen blog posts per month that bring them traffic for years and years and they do very little in social media but still achieve success. Others need more content for their blog and a steady, very heavy stream of content in their social channels. When we meet a new client, before we know too much about their business, this is what we tell them is our “best practice” for most brands – and really the minimum we recommend. What we actually do for any given client rarely looks exactly like this. So think of it as a starting point, and test and adjust a lot for your own brands. But if you’re doing a lot less than this now for your brand….try ramping up to at least this as soon as you can. You might see some great results.
- The amount of blog content you publish depends a lot on resources (we’ll cover that in a few minutes) but ideally you’ll post at least twice per week and more if you have the opportunity!
- Facebook is pretty easy to do. It’s two or three times a day. You’ll publish your owned content as available (so at least every time you have a new blog post, report, or podcast episode), and fill in the rest with curated or co-opted content.
- Because the lifespan of a tweet is so fleeting, you have to plan more content here. This should include 5 pieces of curated content (crafting original editorial around 3rd party links)
- Because you all create a lot of content, you’ll want to post to LinkedIn at least daily, but ideally a couple of times per day. And because for some of you, LinkedIn may be a key social media platform, do not overlook this important social network! If you have fresh new content more than once a day, by all means, post it. But if you don’t, then vary when you post your own content vs. curated content from others – morning vs. midday, morning vs. evening, etc. Info source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/7-vital-statistics-to-help-with-your-linkedin-marketing-strategy
- On Pinterest, you should pin at least 5 times a day to move the needle. This should include owned content as available and curated content the rest of the time. Like other social media platforms, to get the most mileage from pinning 5 times a day, be sure to spread your pinning across the entire day rather than pinning 5 pieces of content all at one time. You can absolutely pin the same piece of content again to a different board, just spread those pins out in your editorial calendar. Try pinning the same content with different images, too. As we have said and will keep saying: test and adjust! Of course, every time you’re logged into Pinterest, look for opportunities to like and comment on other people’s pins too! We’ll talk about that more tomorrow when we get in to platform tactics.
- Again, not going into too much detail, here, but Instagram, like Twitter, is a content hog and needs to be tended to often.
- Unless you are an entertainer, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for how often you should post to YouTube. If you aren’t creating a lot of video content, then publish it as it’s ready. If you’re planning longer-term content, for example a web series tied to another overarching content campaign tied to eBooks and other information products, then publish on a schedule that makes sense. Whatever you do, don’t miss the opportunity to socialize your new and old YouTube content into your social streams. It will go into your Owned content categories on your editorial calendar. Repost videos occasionally, too!
- ….. If you were doing the math that’s over 200 pieces of your own content a month! (not counting the curated content) Don’t worry, though. We’ve got a plan and a few tips and tricks to help you make it happen!
- Okay, so now we know what content is, and a little bit about how to distribute it. But how do you actually create it? It helps to have a solid plan.
- There are 4 steps in your content engine. You’ll need to plan your content, gather your resources, organize your content and then publish it. Let’s talk about what’s involved in each one of these steps.
- Essentially, planning your content comes down to having themes, topics and then content. You can create content for all of the themes which are relevant to your business Each theme will have multiple topics Each topic will align itself with one or more content types The goal is to create enough content to feed all of your content types and across all of your audience personas Remember that certain content types naturally fit best with various stages of the inbound funnel So, how do you do that?
- Here’s how to develop themes for your business No one wants to read two to three posts per week about your product or service If you only wrote directly in the bullseye of your product or business, you’d only attract people who are specifically looking for you, or that information In order to attract people who don’t even know about you, or may have tangential questions or business needs, you must broaden your content core Your content will cover both your product and adjacent or related themes – in some distance outside of your core. How far out you go depends on your product and industry. This is not as difficult as it seems and, in fact, really relieves some pressure in coming up with content ideas if you have a highly-focused product or service. For a moment, let’s pretend we have a single product, which is a Make Money Using Webinars course.
- There are some themes that relate directly to your product. These themes could include anything about your product specifically or things people might want to know before they buy your product. I’ve highlighted those in red. These are all going to be pretty close to the bullseye of your product. Beyond that, you’re going to layer on content that would attract people who might not know they are interested in purchasing a webinar course. These themes, highlighted in orange, build out a new audience for your product. For example, anyone interested in webinar facts and figures might stumble across your content and learn about your webinar course. Maybe they become a lead. You can nurture them, and eventually convert them. But these are just themes. Now you need specific topics and content types for each theme.
- Everyone has a copy of this worksheet in your handouts. You can take this back to your desk and make copies or download fresh copies at CrackerjackMarketing.com.
- Many of our clients hire us because they say “we don’t know what to write” or “we don’t know what content to create. We of course can do this for them, but we also train clients on how to develop topics so they can create their own content. Here are some principles for developing topics: Be ruthless in gathering up every scrap of content ideas you or your team has Hold regular brainstorms to generate ideas Listen to your customers: what are they asking/saying in social media, in emails to you, to customer service Answer all their questions Don’t be afraid to be controversial: controversy generates traffic. But stay within the accepted norms of your company.
- Developing your themes and topics was probably the hardest step in this entire process. So, good news, at this stage of becoming a content engine, you’ve already gotten through the hardest part! Now it’s time to identify the resources you’ll need to produce what you’ve planned and gather them all together.
- Your own social networks Use the Twitter “search” tool (on Hootsuite or on Twitter.com) to find relevant content – it won’t be perfect, but it’s a great place to start Follow relevant people and you’ll get good content there too Check Aggregators and Newsgroups Type keywords into aggregation sites such as AllTop, StumbleUpon & Reddit Create a Google Alert Email newsletters Subscribe to a few from adjacent/non-competitive companies and read them daily, curate directly from there Use Feedly or Flipboard
- You’ll also want to get your team in place. This entire team might be just you. That’s okay too!
- These are some of the ways that companies accomplish content creation. If you’re a very large company, you may have multiple, maybe even dozens or hundreds, of content creators. They may be writers, video people, graphic artists, and other types of creative people. User generated content – UGC – is crowdsourcing content. It’s developing campaigns or contests that encourage people to share content with your brand. You can also work with influencers, often on a paid basis, to create content for you – and you get to leverage their reach, when they share that content to their social networks or on their blog. Your company also doesn’t need to go it alone; there are lots of agencies, like ours, who can do all of this and more.
- I’ll be going over more tools in a little but but here are some other resources to consider and/or gather, depending on the type of blog content you plan to create and distribute.
- So, now, you’ve planned all this great content, maybe even started writing and producing it too because you’ve gathered your team and resources. Now it’s time to keep it all organized. This really is key to long-term inbound marketing success. At the center of this step is …..
- Your editorial calendar! One key part of getting organized is using an editorial calendar to help program out your content. This is how newspapers and magazines have kept organized for centuries – they know what the major happenings of their year, month or week will look like, and then they fill in content to fill their pages. We can and should do the same in content marketing. Committing your content to a calendar is one bit step towards getting it done (though I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually do it!) The #1 most requested download on our site is my blog editorial calendar. This is something you’ll want to customize based on your own needs but let’s go over some of the basics and “must-haves” here today.
- This is the first tab in your calendar. Here, you will begin to transfer all of your finalized ideas from the content creation worksheet (handout). You’ll be referring back to this and the next several tabs frequently. Be sure to write a full description here. You’ll want it to be clear enough so that any of your other team members can pick this up with as few questions as possible. This of this tab as your guiding light for the rest of the tabs. In your blogging software, you might use “Themes” as “Categories.” But we’re going to use Theme here consistently. Think of them interchangeably.
- Your second tab will be for keeping track of your final topics and content types. Transfer the names of your themes into the aqua colored row. In the rows below write in the topic and the content type – blog post, infographic, video, etc.
- On this tab, you want to record any special dates you don’t want to forget. This should include national holidays, brand events and promotions. If applicable to your industry or audience, you can add in fun holidays such as National Fortune Cookie day and celebrity birthdays. You could also include anticipated industry reports and awards, if these things are relevant.
- Ok! So, now we’re going to start bringing all of those previous tabs together. This is where you’re going to start recording your overarching monthly themes, higher-level campaigns, product launches, etc. It’s also a good idea to record national holidays and industry events here too. This will give you, and your team, a birds-eye view of what you have going on for the upcoming here. Plus, having the higher-level items planned out in advance will help you stay on track and “unstuck” when creating content.
- Now we start getting into the nitty-gritty day-to-day planning. The blog editorial calendar is the center of your universe. This is where you and anybody on your team will be able to see what’s been published and the status of upcoming posts. Your blog manager will keep this up-to-date. Your community manager will also reference this calendar frequently to be sure to have blog posts scheduled to be distributed through social channels appropriately. This is your go-to workhorse that you’ll use daily. It tells you who is writing what, and when. 1. Using the annual calendar, begin filling in each month according to the content chunks you planned. 2. Fill in the gaps in each week so that your content publishes regularly during the “off” times. You’ll set up a publishing schedule that your team can handle and that your audience wants. It must be a perfect compromise between the two. 3. Make sure to keep each team member or blog category evenly used, if that is an important goal.
- And, finally, our social calendars. Most of your social content can be planned in advance, with the exception of real-time engagement and real-time co-opting, of course. This is not only used for writing and planning content, but it’s also great to have a historical archive of your social posts in one place. If needed, these calendars can also be used as part of a review/editing process in your organization.
- Your calendar is set up, and all you need to do is follow it. A team blog has a few more things to do to make the calendar work. Get stakeholders involved in the overview. This will help not only ensure that you didn’t forget anything but helps the team start thinking of ideas ahead of time. Establish communication and collaboration. Decide what your routine will be. Who will remind authors when their posts are due? How will posts be submitted? Who will contact the graphic designer? Where will everything be stored? (We love Google Drive and Drop Box!)
- Now that you’ve published your blog content on your website, you’ll want to syndicate it through social media. Again, since we’re not talking about social media platforms specifically today, we’re not going into too much depth here. I just want to quickly cover it as it relates to your own blog.
- We’ve already outlined how often you should be publishing on each social channel, earlier. Now, we’re going to talk about how often you should push out your original content after it’s been published/announced on your blog. As you can see here on this graphic, you can push it out much more often on Twitter than other channels. Of course, you can always revisit your historical blog content a year later to push out seasonal topics on social. With this schedule in mind, I find it’s always a good idea to go ahead and write the posts for each platform, as I’m writing the blog post, then schedule them out as soon as the post is live. If you have a team of writers, or manage writers for clients, I’d suggest creating a blog post submission form and include a spot for the writers to write these updates. (If you don’t have a blog post submission form, feel free to email me and I’m happy to send you mine to use as a starting point).
- What we just covered is the exact same process we use for creating content with our clients at Crackerjack Marketing. Now, I want to share a few more practical tips for writing and publishing your blog content.
- While keywords are very important for SEO, great writing is even more important. Do try to use keywords effectively but don’t “stuff” your post with them. As long as it sounds natural, you’ll be ok.
- Images are very important too. Not only do they convey the meaning of your writing, it’s what people will share on social. Also, the title of your image helps with SEO. Just be careful to not use copyrighted images are to “borrow” from someone else’s website without permission.
- What’s the use of having a blog if nobody is reading it? Sure, your friends might read it but you want to expand your sphere of influence. Here are a few ways you can get your blog beyond your family, friend and co-workers.
- I’m going to keep beating this horse …. Use your editorial calendar! Any time you get an idea for a post topic, enter in the topics tab so you don’t lose it. It might not be something you can work on now, but it may be something you can assign to someone else or serve as a source of inspiration later. As you read other people’s content that inspires you, bookmark it or keep it in Evernote so you can have a file of inspiration. Don’t let the file get too big, though. Once a week, transfer that information to … yes, the editorial calendar! If you’re getting really stuck on a post, just put it away for a while. Save it in drafts or in DropBox and revisit it another time. You’ll produce something much better when you’re in the right frame of mind to do it.
- There are actually many ”physical” pieces of your blog posts to keep track of. We use Dropbox to make sure all of it stays together. We start with three higher level folders to keep track of where the posts are in the process. Within each folder, we have subfolders for each blog post, with the names of the folders starting with the publication date, so we always have them in chronological order. Then, in each of those subfolders, we keep all of the files related to that blog post. As each post moves through the process of editing, loading and publishing, we move it’s folder into the appropriate top-level file.
- Now, let’s talk about some fun tools I like to use to help me and my clients get the job of blogging and content creation done.
- While we use professional copywriters and editors as much as we can, because social media is about responding and reacting in real time there are occasions when using a professional editor isn’t practical due to time constraints. In these situations, we always, always, always, have more than one team member review what has been written but then we also always, always, always, run it through Grammarly, to make sure we don’t have any participles dangling or commas misplaced.
- Sometimes, coming up with the blog post title is the most difficult part! I’ve used the title generators to not only come up with titles, but to come up with topics too! Now, you can’t take them too seriously at times, but it’s a good source of inspiration. In this example, I used “dogs” as my subject.
- I touched on social media visuals a little earlier but your blog visuals are even more important! After all, this is what people will pin and what people will see in the link previews on other social media channels. Canva has great templates to use for us graphic-design-challenged people.
- This is more social media than blogging, but I use recurpost to automatically schedule evergreen content from my blog to Twitter and Facebook. There are free and paid versions.
- This is found in Google adwords. It’s a great way to research the keywords you might want to use and see what’s related and what people are searching for.
- Not only do you need to make sure your writing great content, you want to make sure that it’s easy for your visitors to read. If you don’t already have a plug in, you may want to consider this easy to use tool.