10 Ways To Get More Results Out Of Less Content

This article was originally published on Forbes

Content marketers just might be their own worst enemies. It seems like we’ve all discovered a good thing, but as more and more people use it, the less effective it gets.

Most of us have figured out how to publish content. 45% of small businesses are using social media to sell to potential customers. And it's fairly simple to set up a blog, queue up some social media posts, and say you’re doing content marketing.

The trouble is, we’re all hungry for results. So when things work (and even when they don’t work), the response is usually, “If this much content got us this much results, let’s make more content to get more results.”

Seems logical enough. More is better, right?

But it doesn’t always work.

There’s another disturbing possibility lurking behind that chart. The only way it makes sense for engagement to go down at almost exactly the rate publishing goes up is if we’ve maxed out peoples’ capacity to consume content.

Some sources believe we have. Here’s one of the graphs from the article that launched the whole “content shock” theory, from Mark Schaefer’s blog.

Content shock is the idea there’s more content available than people can consume. Some people think this is just plain old competition. Others think it could be a major problem for content marketing, or at least a force pushing us all to evolve.

Despite these ominous signs, most content marketers plan to keep publishing more content. Witness the results from Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Prof’s B2B  and B2C  2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America reports. About three out of four content marketers plan to produce more content this year.

This may not be the right choice. The more I compare notes with other content marketers, the more I’m hearing how the smartest ones are actually publishing less content. They’re not giving up on content marketing – not in the least. They’re getting better and better results from it, even as they publish less.

Want to know what they’re doing that you’re not? Keep reading – and prepare to rethink the old “more is better” content strategy.

1) Create great content.

I hear this advice over and over again. Many of the smartest people in marketing will tell you that without a quality content to promote, you might as well not even bother.

Here’s how Dennis Shiao, Director, Content Marketing for DNN Corp explains the quality imperative:

The content strategy of some brands is to throw paint at a wall and see what sticks. Instead, they could master the art of fine painting. Instead of 25 blog posts per month, create two high-quality, long-form posts that help your target audience solve a problem.

Throw the mandate for content quantity out the window. Focus instead on quality. Both visitors and search engines will notice, and in the end, you come out ahead. On the  DNN blog, we’re publishing less posts than before, but our engagement rates and return visits are higher.

2) Share your content on social media - more than once.

Here’s a stat that breaks my heart: Half of the articles published online get eight social shares or less. That stat is from a study of one million articles that BuzzSumo and Moz published. They also found that 75% of those posts resulted in zero inbound links.

We can do better. Get in the habit of using a social media scheduling tool (like Buffer or HootSuite) and queue up some posts. Share your new content every other day for the first week, then once a week for a month after that. Keep sharing it again, at least once a month, until that content is out of date. With that schedule, you’ll get more than eight shares even if you only use one platform.

Still worried about promoting your content that far after publication? Then consider top content marketer Heidi Cohen’s  advice. She tells it straight: “Continue content promotion beyond the first month. Many marketers stop too soon. Integrate this distribution into your marketing promotion plan. Use different presentations to avoid fatigue.”

Hold that thought about different presentations. We’ll return to it again.

3) Use other people's content - the right way.

You can use people’s content and to achieve your content marketing goals, and it’s not cheating – so long as you give people credit for their work. It’s called curating. You can curate up to 20% or 30% of what you share on social media. You can also curate blog posts and email newsletter content.

Curated newsletters are so popular they’re almost a content format unto themselves. Dave Pell’s Next Draft is considered one of the best.

4) Simply publish less often.

I know: It’s suspiciously simple. But here’s what CoSchedule discovered when they trimmed back content production:

5) Refresh “legacy” content.

How long have you been publishing content on your website? A year? Two years? Three? That old content vault is a massive opportunity.

Take some of the time you might have spent creating new content and go back refresh that old content. Major sites like Econsultancy have gotten good results with this. Not only can refreshed content get you good results, but according to Heidi Cohen, it “...requires less resources than the original."

This is one of the best sleeper content marketing tactics around. Use it before your competition figures it out.

6) Build a system for reformatting your content.

Always be eyeing your content for how it could be reformatted. Perhaps some of your blog posts could be reformatted into an eBook (or even a Kindle book). Maybe you’ve got a blog post that would make a good video. Maybe one of your tutorials could be made into a SlideShare. There are more ways to do it, but you get the idea.

Once you get a system going for reformatting content, it’ll get easier. So you’ll do it more often. This is one of the best techniques around for getting way more mileage out of one piece of content.

7) Promote your content.

When I say “promote” here, I mean doing more than just sharing your content on social. I’m talking about paid promotion (aka “advertising”), reaching out to influencers, and other tactics.

The most effective content marketers invest time and resources into actually, you know, marketing their content. SEO superstar Brian Dean sends out 100 emails for every post he publishes.  Derek Halpern teaches his marketing students to spend five times as much time promoting their content as they spend creating it.

Remember, we are doing content marketing here. Not just content creation.

The advertising part of content promotion is becoming more and more important. Isn't it ironic that content marketers – who got into content marketing to do less advertising – are now advertising their content?

8) Optimize your content for search engines.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is SEO really isn’t that hard. You just need to know and apply the SEO basics

The bad news? If you don’t know the basics of ho

w search engine optimization works, you need to learn them. Because content marketing needs SEO as much as SEO needs content.

Here’s how Andy Crestodina, Co-founder of Orbit Media, sees it:

There's one way to write less, but actually get more traffic to your website: optimize your content for search. There are two challenges involved:

1. Align your content with topics that people are searching for. Use tools to discover the best blog topicssuch as Analytics and the Keyword Planner.
2. Make the best page on the Internet for that topic. Period.

That second step is hard, I know. But it's worth the effort. Go big on quality, not quantity, and you've got a chance at creating something that stays visible for months or years, rather than days or weeks. A great page well optimized is a visitor magnet. Even a few of these can have a dramatic impact on traffic, more than making up for decreased frequency!

9) Plan smarter.

This speaks to both content strategy and actual content planning. Content planning is the simpler of the two: It involves tools like editorial calendars, efficient approval processes, and the nuts and bolts of managing a content team.

Strategy is different, and probably more important. Without a smart strategy that’s aligned with your business goals, even great content and fancy planning tools may do you no good.

In the table below, notice how best in class content marketers are different. They write down their content strategy. They also have a clear idea of what success looks like and what their editorial goals are.

10) Pay attention to results.

Have you ever done a content audit? It’s like an SEO audit, but focused on content. It's also of the best ways to take all the best practices, case studies, and research available and actually apply them to your business.

Here’s the kind of stuff that can happen after a content audit. Nathan Ellering, content marketing lead at CoSchedule, explains:

What if every blog post you publish achieved similar results as your best-performing content? That was the question we asked ourselves, assuming the answer would be even bigger results from a bigger audience who expects only purely awesome stuff without the fluff.

And you know what? That assumption was right.

When we analyzed our top-performing content at CoSchedule, we found four characteristics every successful blog post possessed: keyword-driven, a unique topic, comprehensive and step-by-step advice, and deep research. So we used that data to plan new content and grew traffic to new blog posts by 299%. We didn’t publish more content, we published smarter content, and the results speak for themselves.

Without the content analysis, they’d never have known what they needed to do to get those results.

CONCLUSION

I think it’s time to step back from just blindly creating more and more content. It’s time to get more strategic. To publish less content, but get far more out of what we do publish than we did before.

That includes refreshing old content, reformatting successful content, curating, and sticking to the best practices of SEO. It also means marketing our content, and that assumes our content is worth marketing.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Has your company considered publishing less content? Are you already doing some of the things listed here? Leave a comment and tell us what you think.