It’s no secret that content is the reigning king of SEO. Well-written, informative and useful content is going to bring a lot of more value to the reader, as well as the company who wrote it. Good content has legs and a life of its own. Articles can rank in the search engines, Facebook posts get shared across the social networking community, blog posts get referenced by other writers and more. In short, good content keeps providing value long after it has been published.
One of the biggest challenges companies face when creating content is simply finding the time to sit down and write. Really well-researched and well-written articles don’t get pulled together in a few minutes. Since a content marketing campaign requires consistent creation of quality content, many writers begin to feel overwhelmed. As time goes on they run out of ideas, get writer’s block or just don’t have the time to produce good content. Yet the deadline remains the same, so they slap something together and call it a day.
The Google Panda update showed us that low-quality and mediocre content isn’t going to cut it anymore. So writers have to be producing quality, engaging and relevant content at all times. This may seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Companies should invest the time in creating a few really solid pieces of content and then recycling them across several platforms to get the most out of that piece of content. It has to be said that content recycling is the not the same as content spinning. Content recycling still involves creating unique content, but it’s more like a wheel spoke process. The original piece of content provides the center of reference for everything else created. It is not submitting the exact same thing over and over.
For instance, let’s say a software development company launches a new product. Obviously that new product is going to need its own page on the company website. That page is full of well-written content that describes the product and its benefits to the end user. Using some of that information, the company drafts an online press release announcing the release of their new software. They use the same keywords and a few key phrases from the webpage as anchor text to provide one-way links back to the product page.
Next, the company writes a short post for their company blog announcing the new product, discussing the development process and why they decided to create it. Again, they pull from the product page for important highlights. It’s possible that blog post gets read by a consumer blogger who focuses on the software industry, so he writes a post for his blog about the new product. That promotional blog post links back to the company blog and the product page.
The day after the press release goes live, the company sends out a solo e-mail blast to their customers. Not only do they announce the release of the new product, they also offer a 10% discount for customers should they want to upgrade to the new software. The email focuses on how the new software fixes issues that the competitor’s software doesn’t. That solo email includes share buttons so recipients can post it to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the company has written up appropriately targeted posts for all of their social networking profiles to announce the new software. While these descriptions might vary in length and detail, the message stays consistent.
To help potential customers better understand how the new software works, the company decided to produce a short demonstration video. That video is posted to the company website, as well as video sharing sites like YouTube. At the end of the video, viewers are encouraged to visit the site to download a trial version of the software. After the product has been released, the company develops a whitepaper on a specific issue of their industry and how their company worked to remedy those issues with this product.
With all the pieces of content that were created; product page, press releases, blog post, video, social media content, white papers, etc, the information was all pulled from that original piece of content. While the surrounding information and delivery method may have changed, all the content kept the same core pieces of information. This software product provides X benefits for X users, that message never wavered regardless of how the content was presented. That is the key to recycling your content and transitioning it to other platforms. Taking the same message and tailoring it with each new content format allows the information to be presented in a slightly different way and targets a different audience. It helps cast a wider net for potential customers because the message is being spread across several platforms.
