How To Save Time From Your Content Marketing Efforts

Most businesses these days engage in content marketing in one way or another and we take this process for granted. We rarely stop to think about if what we are doing is optimized and if our time is being spent efficiently. Even if you have delegated the whole process, you will need to give instructions to your in-house employees on how to do tasks in a timely and optimized way.

In this article, we will see the best ways to save time on your content marketing efforts, while reducing complexity.

Streamline Your Content Promotion Activities

As we know, content marketing shouldn’t end when we hit “Publish” on our article. Promoting an article once it’s published can include many activities, like posting on your social media, sharing it in your newsletter, posting it in relevant communities and more.

The thing is, having an employee do all of these activities can get confusing for her. On top of that, some days your employee might forget some of these tasks or complete them in the wrong order, ending up wasting time. In order to counter this, you simply need to create a checklist with the steps to follow after an article is published. The actions should be completed from top to bottom, so it’s easy for everyone to follow it and use it.

The checklist can be something simple like a Google doc or a Trello board.

That way you are making sure they are doing all the actions with the right workflow for both maximum efficiency and best results.

Hire a WordPress editor

If you are like most businesses you have article writers writing blog posts for your business. The thing is that most writers won’t proofread their blog posts and they will send them with some typos, let alone upload them to WordPress.

So, it usually falls upon you or on someone else in your team to properly format the articles, add meta descriptions and find images. This is something that you shouldn’t be doing yourself and if a teammate is doing it that’s outside of their core job, they will hate it. Sometimes they might not even do it properly like targeting the right keywords etc.

Hiring a WP editor, ideally someone who is already a blogger, to take this part off your plate will free up time from your personnel, while doing a better job at it.

Tasks may include:-

• Formatting the blog posts with H2, proper spacing etc
• Adding meta description and meta title
• Finding images for your article
• Proofreading and adding the correct tags and category

Although these activities are important, they are menial and an editor who knows her way around WP can do it better and faster.

Plan Your Blog Post Titles Ahead Of Time

Everyone who has been engaging in content marketing for some time has been struck with what’s called “writer’s block”, which is not knowing what to write about. When you don’t know what to write about, it’s very common to skip writing for that week and then for the next week and eventually being inconsistent in your content marketing efforts.

On top of that, deciding what to write about on a weekly basis can be very inefficient and time consuming. The best way to counter this is to follow once per month a consistent, predictable process to generate blog post ideas along with short descriptions for that month.

There are many ways to generate blog post ideas and here are some of the most effective ones:

• Subscribe to industry blogs and publications on Feedly. Go through the titles and get inspiration for similar ones.
• Use a tool like Buzzsumo to find popular titles and create similar ones. For example, if you see a title like “A Guide To Facebook Ads” performing well, you can create “A Guide To LinkedIn Ads”.
• Search on forums, communities and Quora for discussions around your topic and address those questions with a blog post.

Once you start generating ideas, you can add them either to your Trello or content calendar to be written by your writers. Then you won’t have to struggle every week to find new titles. Remember to always have a deliverable date by each title, so the writer knows her deadline.

Connect Your Blog To Your Social Media

This is a bit controversial but let me explain … Connecting your blog to your social media accounts will automatically post every new blog post you publish to your social media, by getting the article’s title and description. It’s fairly easy to set up, especially if your site is built on WordPress.

On one hand, automating this process is not considered to be in the “best practices”, but on the other hand there are many businesses that blog weekly, but they totally ignore their social media.

Faced with having your social media updated once a month (or less), it’s’ better to automate it, even if it’s not considered “best practices”. That way, you will get some clicks from FB to your site and when someone visits your FB page they won’t see it hasn’t been updated for months.

Conclusion

To wrap this up, doing content marketing successfully is one thing, but saving time on it and doing it more efficiently is a whole other story. Both are equally important. Saving time on your content marketing efforts, beside saving you money, they also make your employees happier and more fulfilled and that’s something that you can’t put a value on.

Good luck!

Continue reading here: 5 Steps To Write Awesome Blog Posts People Love To Read

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