The competition in the content market is fierce as always. If you wish to create great content, you need to understand that good content cannot be created in a rush. It needs time. Quality, Volume, and Consistency are the golden trifecta that helps content creators manage their long-term content strategy. However, due to the huge influx of content during the pandemic era, the keys to achieving long-term content success have changed slightly. While it remains unsaid that quality, consistency, and volume of content are still important, there have been new additions to the trifecta. The new golden trifecta for managing long-term content highlights are quality, Quality, Consistency, and Relevance. As a content creator, one can never compromise on the quality of content since high-quality content helps in higher search engine ranking and builds trust with readers, nor the consistency of releasing new content to keep the audience engaged, but what is possible is prioritizing the content that needs to be put out.
As a content creator or a company that uses content tools such as blogs, or guest posts to increase their viewership and generate leads, planning a long-term content strategy is absolutely critical. Content takes time to reach the right audience, and it can take anywhere from a week to more than a year for your content to get a good ranking on Google. Hence, you need to play the long game and prepare for a marathon rather than a sprint. Here are a few ways that you can grease your long-term content strategy wheels:
Prepare a Content Roadmap
According to a survey by Orbit Media, bloggers who publish more often get better results. A content roadmap is essential for releasing quality content consistently. It helps in gaining the trust of your audience that they can rely on your content for proper information about certain products or industry trends. By having a content roadmap you can build SMART goals.
- Specific- Like focusing on monthly readers.
- Measurable- Improving viewership by 15%
- Achievable- Not too far-fetched like gaining 50% new readers
- Relevant- Like gaining new customers for your business
- Time-Bound- Within a certain time frame like 3 months.
So the goal could be- Improving monthly readership by 15% within a period of 3 months.
A content roadmap also helps you prioritize and organize your content themes. You can set themes for each month or quarter and even modify them as per data analysis of new trends or performance of each topic in converting leads. Overall, a content roadmap acts as a compass for your long-term goals.
Audit Your Existing Content
Auditing your existing content ensures that all your published content is still relevant and generating leads. Without proper inspection, content can pile up in huge stacks that may bury better, more relevant resources that you have published. Timely auditing of your content allows you to remove dead backlinks, modify internal links, or even improve the SEO keywords as per the latest guidelines to refresh the content.
Auditing your content, whether it is on web content or blogs, helps you discover gaps in your content that you can fill and optimize to gain better results. You can re-use the marketing resources that are already available and ensure that you eliminate duplicate work. Content auditing will help in improving the credibility of the information that you publish. This will engage more customers and generate new leads.
Integrate Company Goals In Your Content
Many companies post blogs and guest posts as a marketing tool for their own products and services. As a content writer, you need to ensure that your content is aligned with the goals of the company and acts as a proper tool for promoting their products and services. Let’s assume you are a copywriter from a top creative advertising agency hired by a retail brand to promote their upcoming offers. This means your content should speak about their upcoming offers or events that they are going to launch as a promotion tactic, like a Christmas Sale or a Fall Discount.
This way, you are incorporating the goals of the company into your blog, which can later be either optimized with a new set of keywords or refreshed with newer goals, while maintaining the relevance of the content and promoting the next event. Content marketing experts will always emphasize that aligning content with the brand narrative is important for achieving sales goals.
Refine Your Content Through Relevancy
As a content writer, you need to refine your content based on the relevancy of the topic you are writing about. There are a number of things that should be taken into account while editing the content document, such as the number of backlinks, internal or external links, typos, sources, data corrections, etc. The more refined the content is, the greater its relevance. People often search the internet for very specific requirements, so if your content is not precise or to the point and is instead vague and ambiguous, it will be ranked low by search engines. This is the main reason why SEO is so important today. It helps in making the content more relevant and visible for the audience it is intended for.
Even if it somehow gets a good ranking, there will always be the issue of low conversions. So you need to keep in mind that for content to be fresh and creative, it also needs to be relevant. Writer’s often overlooked their own mistakes, so taking a second opinion will only help you optimize your content. You also need to stay consistent with your fonts, images, and other formats to maintain brand consistency.
Upcycle Your Content
Reviewing content will often make you discover gaps in your content that you could not see in the past. Seeing these gaps in your content will only trigger your creative juices to think of ways to fill in those gaps, improve that content piece, and optimize it. Over time, each blog post will lose its relevance in the eyes of the intended audience because the information provided within it is old or expired. It will run its shelf life and generate less click-throughs and leads.
You can always upcycle your content by optimizing various aspects of your content piece. You can replace old keywords with new keywords with the help of talented digital marketing experts; you can also update the links in the blog with new stats or references to keep up with the latest trends. Using these methods, you can turn some of your content into evergreen content and keep promoting it for a long time.
Final thoughts
There are many ways in which you can use content as a tool for marketing your brand and writing blogs or guest-posting are just a few of them. For your business to generate proper leads and your content to gain more views, promoting it on different social media platforms is the most effective way. A long term content strategy is a good way to create content that will go a long way. You can always follow the above mentioned tips to create an abstract long-term strategy and then work your way into the minor details to perfect it.
