…or a Ronco Rotisserie Showtime special for that matter.
Oh I know – you paid enough money to have it look good and have the copy all “SEO’d” and everything, and yes, your designers have made it really easy to add content and even talked to you about a content strategy, but you're busy - and now that it’s done can’t you just Set it and Forget it?
NO!
Well – you could of course, but then after 6 months you won’t have generated any leads and you’ll have confirmed your inner suspicion that this whole blogging content stuff is nonsense and you'll go back to spending money on feel good marketing that doesn’t work – but you’ll feel better.
Don’t believe us? Just ask Eric Smilay of Smilay Properties who started a content strategy on his website a year ago – his year on year figures are up over 500% - page views per month have moved from the hundreds to the thousands – did he Set it and Forget it? No!
We'll be chatting to Eric in the next couple of weeks and will post about how he overcame the inertia that often kills the execution of a small business content strategy.
It’s not just about the blog posts
Yes – the core of your content strategy is going to be writing new posts – adding new video, images etc – and yes you’re going to be thinking about who the audience is and what they want to hear. However, there is something that is even easier to do and often time more effective
Recycle and improve your existing content
When you look at your weekly stats (you do look at your weekly stats don’t you?) you’ll notice that there are certain pages on your website that always seem to get traffic. Could be that post you wrote about the decline in the Bolivian talcum powder industry or that insider’s look into the world of extreme Lego. Whatever – there are people out there who are regularly finding that article and are enjoying it.
Revisit it – can you improve it – can you make it read more easily, add an appropriate image, should you offer a translation, what can you do to make the experience for the reader better? Not only that – can you add a link to another relevant article on your website, do you have a service or product that would be useful to people who like this kind of content?
It’s a living thing
The days of Set it and Forget it are long gone and even though there will always be hour long infomercials on products that you really don‘t want but that seem too good to pass up at 3 in the morning – switch that shit off and go and look at your website. If you're not treating it with a little love and content, you'll lose any benefit it might have provided.
In the immortal words of Jeff Lynne:
It's a livin' thing,
It's a terrible thing to lose
It's a given thing
What a terrible thing to lose
