Ways to keep your best content in front of visitors
A key part of any content strategy involves being able to identify your best content and keep it in front of visitors. After all, with the amount of content you should be generating, you don’t want your best posts to get lost in the avalanche. However, many businesses are at a loss as to how they can effectively keep their best content in front of visitors. Here are some of our top content repurposing strategies to make sure you content gets the attention it deserves.
How do you find your best content?
Go back to your analytics. What content has the best conversion rate? What pages do visitors enter on, and which ones generate the most traffic? Furthermore, which ones do they spend the most time on? You should be able to answer these questions by looking at Google Analytics and reports from your CRM.
However, this isn’t a “once-and-done” search. Many people believe that a piece of content will only be seen right after it’s posted. However, it takes time for your SEO strategy to pay off and for your content to begin ranking in the search results. Because of this, you will want to keep an eye on your analytics to find posts as they begin to rank well. Pay attention to these and use them to your advantage.
Make sure your content is accessible.
I recently spoke with a woman who had a successful email newsletter she sent out every month or so. She filled with lots of high-value content—from her description several blog’s worth. But she didn’t post any of it to her website. Essentially, all of that content resided on her email server and in the inboxes of her mailing list. It was hard to access, and none of it was doing her website any good.
Think about any content you may have that isn’t easily accessible to your audience. If you have a long-running newsletter, mine it for relevant content and post that to your blog. Maybe you have some gated content that doesn’t convert as well as it used to—if it still has some value, go ahead and post that. If some of your content is behind a paywall, think about whether it should stay there. You may decide it has the most value to you as paid content, but it may be time to move it out into the open.
Pull it into an e-book.
Conversely, if you’ve identified several top-performing posts, don’t be afraid to repackage them as an e-book. They’ll probably require some editing and extra content writing. However, an e-book or other piece of prime downloadable content gives your visitors another way to engage with your content and helps you identify sales leads. After all, many of your visitors may find a PDF they can save and access at any time highly useful.
Use categories to display related posts.
If you’re using WordPress, you should be familiar with the “Categories” list in your post editor. Whenever you post a blog, make sure you give it at least one category. Creating new categories is easy to do if your blog doesn’t fit into one of the existing ones. And if you can include it in multiple categories, do so.
Categories allow your visitors to see other posts that are related to the post they just read. They also let you display recommended posts that fall into the same topic category. If you’ve ever noticed a “related posts” section in a side bar, or scrolled to the end of a post to see “if you like this you might also like…” then you know what I’m talking about. By keeping relevant posts in front of your visitors, you can subtly encourage them to spend more time on your site. The more of your content they read, the more they will trust you and remember your site once they’ve left.
Include internal links.
Any time you post a blog, read through it to see if there are good places to link to some of your other blogs. And if you go back to an old blog post and see a way to include an internal link to a newer one, do so. Just like using related categories keeps related content in front of your visitors, internal links can direct them to other blogs that could supplement or validate your current blog topic.
Similarly, creating a “best of” or “top 10” list can also be an effective content repurposing strategy, particularly if you’re having a light week and struggling for blog topics.
Repost to social media.
Don’t be afraid to put out an “oldie but goodie” every now and then. Grab a blog post from a few months back—one that’s been around long enough to rank, but it’s so old as to be outdated. For instance, if you had a thematic post based around a holiday, you could include that with your content for this year. Unless your topic was time-sensitive, much of it should still apply.
If one of your posts from a six or seven months ago has begun to rank well in Google, you can re-share it or use it as the basis for a landing page or ad campaign.
Need help building a content repurposing strategy for your business?
Content marketing involves a lot of moving pieces, and it can be overwhelming to keep up with on your own. We work with businesses to combine their content with SharpSpring’s automated marketing CRM so that you get the most out of your content. We also look for content repurposing opportunities, so if we see a way to post that’s doing well, or an opportunity to build some internal links, we’ll always take advantage of it.
So if your business needs some help getting its content marketing off the ground, contact us. We’d be glad to give your site and audit and deliver a plan that works for you.