How to squeeze maximum value from your blog
To be successful, small business owners must learn how to get the most value out of every dollar they spend and every ounce of effort they invest in a project.
However, one of the reasons many small businesses have unsuccessful blogs is because they fail to get all the value from the work they put into it. This causes many to simply give up blogging, resulting in poor search engine optimization and ineffectual content marketing.
Easy ways to make great content
One way to get the maximum value from your blog is to rework and repurpose content. Here are some examples:
- Do a series of articles on a topic and turn them into a white paper.
- Turn a few white papers into an ebook.
- Do a video or podcast version of a written blog, or vice versa.
- Convert a blog into an infographic or cartoon.
- Convert a blog into a Slideshare presentation.
Those are just some of the ways you can reuse or repurpose existing blog content. But there’s one important first step you need to take before you can do any of those things: You need to create “evergreen” content.
How to find evergreen content
Evergreen content is content that will be as relevant three years from now as it is today. For example, I find that my readers get very interested when I post something about a controversial political issue and I get rewarded with a lot of page views. However, those posts are soon dated and while they drummed up a lot of traffic for a week or two, they soon become irrelevant.
In contrast to this, I have some articles on evergreen topics that draw traffic to my website every day and will continue to draw traffic for years to come. In the long run, they are far more valuable than the short-lived, popular articles.
The challenge is to find evergreen topics. If you know your niche at all, you’ll probably be able to come up with some of these right off the top of your head. But when you want a little inspiration, try these strategies.
- Search Amazon. Go to Amazon.com and find categories of books that relate to your topic. Find the bestsellers in these categories and then look to see how long they have been selling well. Choose topics that cover areas similar to the material in the bestsellers that have been on the charts for years.
- Answer Who? What? Why? When? How? Answering these questions will lead you to the “big ideas,” and the answers to the “big ideas” tend to stay the same for a long, long time.
- Explain “how to.” Related to the previous strategy, are all of the how-to articles. Remember, new people are getting interested in what you do everyday and they need some basic how-to instruction. In other words, there will always be a fairly high level of demand for mastering the basics. If you need some inspiration, go to YouTube and do a search on the term “how to” and see what people are watching. By the way, if you go beyond “how to” and also address who, what, where, and when, you may have most of what you need for an e-book or extensive white paper, which you can give away in exchange for an email address or even sell.
- Check Google Trends. When you have a topic in mind, run the keywords associated with the topic through Google Trends. That will help you see if the interest in your topic is going up, going down or holding steady. Below is the trend for the keyword “bicycle touring,” and you can see that interest seems to be on a steady downward path.
When you have a topic that you think will have a long “shelf life” on your website, write it up and then start consider repurposing the content into other formats. By the way, did you notice the headline on this blog? I think people will always be looking for good ways to come up with evergreen content.