You’ve spent countless hours and dollars creating your content marketing strategy. Your company blogs, engages social media and creates downloadable long-form content such as ebooks and white-papers.
It is a furious pace to keep up with, but is this constant rat-race to produce content never-ending? Capitalize on your word investment and increase the longevity of your writing by future proofing your content.
A few years ago, Mark Schaefer identified “content shock”, a term to describe an inevitable reality in our content driven universe. There is simply too much content and not enough time to consume all of it. (Source: Business Grow)
Use these tips to future proof your content and battle content shock (and writers burn out).
Review for the Bait and Switch.
Perhaps you wrote a headline that violates a search crawling rule enforced by Google or Facebook. Now is the time to revisit your headlines and re-write them for timelessness.
- Avoid clickbait.
Facebook recently updated its news algorithm to punish websites and posts that rely on clickbait. Don’t rely on clickbait tactics for traffic. Ambiguous headlines or social media posts only mislead the reader. Instead, be succinct and direct. Write to the keyword you are trying to capitalize on. Use a statistic in your headline to pique genuine interest.
- Avoid hyperbolic headlines.
What might work for BuzzFeed will not work for your blogging efforts. Avoid two sentence headlines for longevity. These headlines that were once popular lose their effects over the long term.
Rework Trends that Fizzled.
Did you capitalize on a hot trend that didn’t last? Before scrapping the piece consider:
- Revisiting content for useable bits and pieces that can be repositioned.
Did you use the trend as an example? If it can be easily extracted from the piece, just remove and replace with a more current example or something a little more evergreen.
- Writing an update for the trend-based piece if it is integral to the body of content. Analyze why the trend endured or fizzled and write about it.
- Setting up Google Alerts for specific industry keywords.
Or search Google news for these keywords. Look at current trending copy for the keyword and use that as your basis for turning your once timely content into something timeless.
Change Your Content Vehicle.
All evergreen content remains relevant but the way readers consume content is constantly changing.
- Review your content strategy for content types.
Do you deliver your message mostly though blogs and ebooks? Do you utilize a video strategy or a podcast? Chances are pretty good that your company utilizes only a few channels to disseminate the majority of your messages. - Compare your content delivery method to current trends.
Audio and video content has grown tremendously recently. In fact, 80% of all internet traffic is projected to be video by 2018. (Source:
(Source: Cisco)
21% of Americans ages 12 and up have listened to a podcast in the past month, which is an increase from 17% in 2015. What's more, monthly podcast listenership has increased 75% since 2013.
(Source: Edison Research)
- Take your existing content and rework it for another media vehicle.
Do your blogs lend themselves well to podcasting? Consider your blogs as scripts for a possible podcast or video.
- Combine related blogs into an ebook.
2-4 multipart blogs can lay a strong foundation for an ebook with a little editing.
Evaluating your current content and repurposing that content for a longer shelf life not only gives your content a fresh coat of paint, but it also increases SEO value, broadens your content’s appeal and gives your blog writer (or your fingers) a well deserved respite from the content grind.
Happy (re)writing!
