You’ve researched and brainstormed, and then you’ve researched and brainstormed some more, and you now have a rockstar of an idea for a blog post. The adrenaline is pumping, and you’re ready to blow the world away with your insights. You sit down to write a blog post focused on your new idea.
Wait!
Before you write your post, take a step back and strategize how to get more bang for the buck from your idea. To do this, take that one great idea and turn it into a continual stream of blog posts. Instead of just one piece of content, let that idea generate two, three or thirty posts. By generating more content for each idea you have, your content marketing will be more efficient, your content marketing ROI will increase and you’ll be able to scale your efforts more easily.
How?
There are various ways to develop a stream of posts from a single idea. Here are a few powerful ones to get you going:
Develop a Theme
Develop a theme and cover different topics with the same theme. For example, in our own blog, when we decided to write about marketing trends we thought that readers would be just as eager to learn about trends at a more granular level. So, after our post about 2015 marketing trends, we wrote about web design trends, SEO trends and PR trends. Instead of one post, we were able to publish four all based on the same overarching theme, generating 1,659 incremental page views and 245 incremental social shares.
Our content calendar for 2016 already has a whole new batch of trend posts scheduled for the new year. You can easily see how this compounds your content results over time.
Leave Them Hanging
A good strategy to get your readers back to your site is to write about a topic in great depth, labeling your first post “Part I.” You would then go on to publish a “Part II,” “Part III,” etc. Not only do you get the benefit of the additional content, you also increase your repeat visitors.
Schedule It
Decide on a scheduled series. One of our clients writes an industry recap at the beginning of every month. By adhering to a schedule, you have a set topic to write about every month (or week or quarter, etc.) for years to come. This also helps with your efficiency, as you develop refined processes for capturing and writing about the topic over time.
Solve Additional Problems
What problem is your blog post solving for the reader? Can your idea solve additional problems? If so, then write about them in separate posts.
If you are at a recruiting agency, for example, you may write about effective interviewing techniques for an employer. That’s a good idea, but it solves only one problem. Taking it further, you could then help HR staff and department heads in tackling related yet different problems you know they are facing with their interviews. For example, you can also write about how to train employees to be better interviewers or ways to standardize interview evaluations. Or, going in a different direction, you can write about how to take those effective interviewing techniques and apply relevant elements of them to enhancing communication among your employees. The idea is to hone in on a single persona and solve multiple problems for that person.
Speak to Multiple Audience Segments
In addition to solving problems that a person in a specific position has, think about ways for your idea to resonate with different audiences. Executive vs. manager vs. day-to-day specialist. Software developer vs. marketer vs. salesperson. Etc.
If you’re at a content marketing software company, then you might plan to write a post about content marketing scalability. Taking this idea, you can write one post covering content marketing strategies directed at a VP of Marketing, another about the steps to take in developing a scalable process directed at a manager and another with process checklists for the day-to-day practitioner. You might then go on to write another post about building a content marketing team and the roles each team member fulfills, another post about content marketing for the enterprise, a post about scaling content amplification specifically, and another post about content outsourcing best practices, all based on the single idea of “content marketing scalability” and each of interest to different individuals within an organization.
Shoot Video Like the Sharks
With video, there’s a specific strategy that works like a charm for producing a significant volume of content with minimal effort. The idea is to shoot video for an entire morning (or afternoon). Break it into a series of 1- or 2-minute shots each. You can then generate enough video for months to come. The idea is to make a concerted effort in a limited amount of time, producing outsized volumes of content. (This is essentially how Shark Tank shoots their season of episodes.)
Use Multiple Content Formats
If your idea warrants it, develop it into multiple formats. For example, start with a blog post. Someone who reads your post is obviously interested in the topic, and so it’s probable that they would want a deeper-dive into the subject matter and would download a related, more in-depth eBook as a next step. HubSpot uses this strategy to great success. Consider not only eBooks, but whitepapers, surveys, SlideShares, infographics, checklists, webinars, video, etc.
Photo Credit: Robert Servais
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