Note: To receive practical content management tips and links to useful information, including downloadable checklists, and templates, sign up for our free Content Management Course Lessons, delivered directly to your inbox.
Checklists and templates play a pivotal role in content management for several reasons:
Consistency and Standardization: Checklists and templates ensure a consistent approach to content creation, editing, and publication, fostering standardization across various tasks and team members.
Efficiency and Time-Saving: They streamline workflows, providing a structured framework that helps content managers and teams efficiently navigate through tasks. This leads to significant time savings.
Communication and Collaboration: Checklists serve as clear communication plans, outlining job responsibilities and facilitating collaboration within the content management process.
Error Reduction: Templates act as guides, reducing the likelihood of errors in content creation and publication. They ensure that essential steps and details are not overlooked.
Productivity Boost: By providing a structured roadmap, checklists and templates contribute to enhanced productivity, allowing content managers to conquer goals and meet deadlines more effectively.
Below you will find checklists with links to the Content Documentation section and other lessons in this training course containing downloadable templates and resources and additional information.
Refer to our content management glossary if you need help understanding some of the terms or concepts described in this section.
Your Business
Complete the steps below to ensure that your business has set up the right foundation to develop an effective system for managing its content:
WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts – Become a WordPress power user and save time editing content with this handy WordPress keyboard shortcuts reference guide.
WordPress Security Checklist– Use this WordPress security checklist to make sure that your site is fully secured and protected against hackers and malicious users.
Imagine that your business is run by a team of highly competent, experienced, and knowledgeable people and that there is no need to document anything in your business because everyone is an expert in their area and knows exactly what to do in every situation.
One day, a group of very wealthy investors comes along and expresses an interest in buying your business. They love your products and are very impressed with how things are run.
After introducing them to your wonderful team, they express curiosity about how your business is able to maintain such great standards of quality and consistency and ask about your systems and processes.
You start telling them about the wonderful people in your team and how they know everything.
Your investors then quickly lose interest and withdraw their offer to buy your business.
Why?
Because without documentation, all of the systems and processes of your business exist only inside people’s heads and only for as long as they are physically present and working in your business.
If this is where all of your business systems and processes live, then yours is a very high-risk business! Source: The Small Business Digital Manager
If someone leaves your business, they take your business systems and processes with them.
Documented systems and processes:
Allow your business to improve quality and consistency across all areas.
Help to provide better and faster hiring and training across your organization.
Lead to higher individual/team productivity and efficiency, and better performance and results.
Save time and speed up business growth.
Increase the value of your business.
More importantly, having documented systems and processes allows you to work on your business and improve its results by improving its systems and processes.
Documentation helps you manage your content more effectively.
The section below includes a list of the documentation we recommend your business develop, keep regularly updated, and make accessible to your content team. It will help to improve the quality, consistency, accuracy, and management of all content and content processes in your organization.
Internal Documentation
“Internal documentation is the record of all your company’s internal knowledge, ranging from processes and procedures, best practices, IT and software specs, and much more. Internal documentation is intended for reference by employees to get their work done and standardize performance across the organization.”
In addition to having internal documentation such as company policies and documenting procedures and processes describing how work should be done in the business, keeping documentation for the areas below will help your team create accurate content about the company aligned with its business objectives:
Internal Content
Business Vision, Mission, Core Values
Company History
Business Strategy/ Business Plan
SWOT Analysis
Team Organization Chart
Employee/Team Member Profiles And Descriptions (for blog author pages)
Support Request Guidelines (to help the Customer Support team)
For more information on additional content you can document about your business, see the Business Basics section.
Web Pages
Check that your site has the following pages (note: some pages are optional) and review their content:
Basic Pages
Home Page
About Us/Meet The Team
Contact Page
FAQs
Landing Pages (Products and Services)
Blog Section
Portfolio/Our Work
Careers/We’re Hiring
Roadmap
Legal Pages
Privacy Statement
Terms And Conditions
Website Disclaimers
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Affiliate Agreement
Anti-Spam Policy
Compensation Disclosure
External Linking Policy
Health Disclaimers
Refund Policy
Media Terms Of Use
Web Content Accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide technical specifications to improve the accessibility of web content, websites, and web applications across all devices for people with a wide range of disabilities.
Essential Accessibility is an all-in-one accessibility platform that provides accessibility tools, expertise, training, and support, including compliance guides and a downloadable interactive WCAG checklist.
Use Essential Accessibility’s WCAG 2.1A and AAA interactive checklists to ensure your site and content are compliant with accessibility guidelines.
Documenting the content below will help to speed up the process of content creation and ensure content is aligned with business outcomes and expectations:
Documenting the content below will help to speed up the process of content production, improve timely delivery to production deadlines, and help to ensure the quality and consistency of all created content:
How to share content effectively with others (internally and externally)
This documentation can include training, guides, guidelines, and tips on:
Organizing email inboxes and folders
Using applications and sharing content on work tools (e.g. Slack, Zoom, etc.)
Uploading files to your website, web server, and cloud storage services.
Most professional tools provide their own documentation and tutorials, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just create a simple guide with key processes team members should follow, add links to the tool’s documentation, tutorials, and help sections, and include additional resources from the web (e.g. links to helpful articles or videos).
For example, you can use links to resources like the examples shown below to quickly create a simple yet useful guide for team members on how to organize their Gmail inboxes to help them save time and increase their productivity, then provide this guide as part of their orientation and training process:
Positioning statements help to ensure that your marketing efforts are aligned with your brand.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Describes to your target market how you’re different and why they should buy from you.
Unique Selling Point– Describes how your company stands out from the competition.
Value Proposition – Describes what you are offering to customers for what they are paying and answers the question: Why should customers care that you’re different?
Documenting the areas below will help to improve your content management processes:
Website Documentation
Keeping the information on your website accurate and up-to-date is a form of documentation.
This includes:
Company Pages (e.g. About Us)
Products & Services Pages
FAQs
Blog
Legal Pages
Legal Pages
Your website needs various legal pages to comply with regulatory requirements (e.g. federal and state laws), and 3rd-party providers (e.g. Google). Legal pages can also protect your business from legal issues, legal threats “takedown” notices, etc.
Additionally, depending on the nature of your business, you may also want to consider including some or all of the following pages:
Affiliate Agreement (if you sell products or services through an affiliate program.)
Anti-Spam Policy
Compensation Disclosure
External Linking Policy
Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general health or medical content.)
Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site.)
Media Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site.)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding correct disclosure information to your site is essential. For example:
No Material Connection – Make your visitors aware that you will not receive compensation for writing the content.
Affiliate Links – Make your readers aware that you may be compensated financially if they buy through your affiliate link.
Review/Sample Copy – Disclose to your visitors if you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re reviewing by the author or developer.
Sponsored Post – Make your visitors aware that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
Third-Party Advertising – Let users know if you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Remember to regularly review and update the information on all of the pages listed above.
Documentation Management Systems
Other types of systems that allow you to manage documentation and your content include:
Document Management Systems – A software program designed to help organizations manage, store, and track their electronic and physical documents.
Digital Asset Register – Keep a record of all your documentation and digital assets with descriptions, versioning, location, access URLs, software licenses, subscription services, logins, passwords, etc.
CMS – Building your online presence using a platform like WordPress functions both as a content management system, and a content documentation system as described in the “Website Documentation” section above. Also, see these different types of Content Management Systems:
Document Library – A document library is a collection of files, documents, or records that are systematically organized and stored in a digital format.
Content Tracking – Create documents and guides to help your team track content production and content performance across your organization, understand and interpret results, and create reports.
Documentation Storage – Create documents and guides to help your team access and use various digital storage tools (see below).
Effective content management requires effective ways to collaborate, store, organize, and retrieve documents and content.
Storing documents and content, however, presents its own challenges, as this involves not only working out an efficient way to store, access, and archive digital assets, but also making sure that assets can be worked on collaboratively and be shared, reused, and repurposed across multiple channels.
Some options for storing your documentation and your content include storing your documentation using digital asset management (DAM) software…
You can use Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software…Source: Canto
On a knowledge base platform…
Store public or private documentation and content for customers and employees on an online self-service knowledge base. Source: Document360
On a cloud storage solution (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc.)…
Store your documentation on the cloud using a solution like Amazon’s AWS…
In folders on a shared drive (e.g. Google Drive)…
Store your documentation inside folders on a shared drive.
Or in additional places like cloud-based email, work productivity tools (e.g. Slack channels), and other tools.
Whether your organization chooses to use a digital asset management (DAM) system, online knowledge base software, or set up folders on a shared drive or cloud storage solution will depend on your organization’s digital asset management strategy.
Create an organized system of folders to add all the documentation your team members will need to complete their projects and make these sharable and accessible to your team.
Use easily identifiable folder naming conventions when storing documentation to ensure that the process remains standardized.
Make sure to reference where the folders containing your documentation are located. You can do this using your web browser’s Bookmarks tool and in internal documentation (e.g. create an online guide for your content team for easy access and retrieval of documents).
Document Access
You’ve documented everything in your business and worked out where to store it all…great!
Now, you need to work out how to make all of this documentation easily accessible and retrievable for your team. Otherwise, this will defeat the purpose of creating an efficient system to manage all of your documents and content effectively.
Effective content management requires effective documentation, storage, and access systems.
In addition to the storage methods mentioned earlier (e.g. DAM and Knowledge Bases), there are many places to access your documentation, including:
For example, your web browser’s Bookmarking tool is a great way to organize and access links to documentation and useful tools and resources for your content team.
Your web browser’s Bookmarking tool is a great way to organize and access links to documentation, tools, and useful resources.
You can even export and share your bookmarks so everyone in your team can access the documents, tools, and resources they need quickly and easily.
Use your web browser’s Bookmarking tool to create an organized way for team members to quickly and easily access all the documentation they need to create, promote, and manage content.
Content Documentation – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content documentation:
What is content documentation?
Content documentation refers to the process of creating, storing, managing, and updating all forms of documentation related to a company’s content processes, including text, images, video, and multimedia. This ensures information is easily accessible and can be updated or repurposed efficiently.
Why is content documentation important?
It helps maintain consistency across various content channels, improves collaboration among team members, ensures compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, and serves as a historical record of content strategies and outputs.
What are the key elements of effective content documentation?
Effective content documentation should include a clear purpose, audience identification, structured format, detailed content guidelines, and revision history. These elements ensure that documentation is useful and accessible to all stakeholders involved.
How does a content management system (CMS) support content documentation?
A CMS helps in organizing, controlling, and publishing documentation without requiring technical expertise. Features like version control, access permissions, and integration capabilities make CMS an indispensable tool for content documentation.
What should be included in a content documentation strategy?
The strategy should outline the content lifecycle, roles and responsibilities of the content team, documentation standards, storage and retrieval processes, and tools and technologies used for creating and maintaining documents.
How do I choose the right tools for content documentation?
Select tools based on your specific needs for collaboration, version control, ease of use, scalability, and integration with other systems. Consider the nature of your content and the size of your team to find a suitable solution.
What are some common challenges in content documentation and how can they be addressed?
Common challenges include maintaining up-to-date records, ensuring document accessibility, and managing multiple content formats. Regular audits, training for team members, and leveraging a robust CMS can help address these issues.
Summary
All too often, business knowledge, systems, and processes are stored in the heads of employees and scattered across all the various tools used in the business. There is little documentation and no single source of truth for it.
This leads to valuable time and effort wasted searching for information across all areas of the business, including information required to assist in speeding up areas like content planning, content production, and content promotion.
An effective content documentation system that allows your content team to quickly and easily access all stored documents is essential to effective content management.
Documentation is a massive undertaking, but once started and implemented, it leads to improved results in all areas of the business.
Action Steps
Review this lesson and identify all the different areas of your business that need documentation.
Create a list of all the documented systems and processes each of these business areas needs to operate efficiently and effectively, especially in areas related to content planning, content production, and content promotion.
Develop a plan for organizing, storing, accessing, distributing, and implementing all business documentation.
Begin documenting all systems and processes listed above. This can be as simple as creating bullet-point guides, procedures, and checklists.
Train your team members to use and follow the documentation.
Continually review and improve your documentation.
Resources
How To Use Amazon S3 – Video course on using Amazon AWS to store files (e.g. media, documentation, etc.)
Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to help you troubleshoot issues with your content and improve your content management.
Learn how to set up systems for managing your content effectively.
Content Management
This section looks at how to set up systems for managing your content effectively.
The most effective way to help your business realize its goals and objectives is to turn every content-related area of your business into systems that anyone in your organization can help to manage.
It’s difficult to manage content effectively if you have not set up effective systems and processes to handle the areas of your business responsible for planning, creating, delivering, distributing, and promoting your content.
At the same time, it’s difficult to plan, create, deliver, distribute, and promote your content successfully if your business doesn’t have an effective way to manage all these processes.
In this module, we look at how to address these challenges.
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.
Content Management Is Challenging
Managing content for your website and other digital assets can be challenging as it involves a combination of creativity, organization, and technical skills.
Here are some of the main challenges of managing your content that you may run into:
Content creation: Generating new, high-quality content that aligns with your goals and resonates with your target audience.
Content curation: Selecting, editing, and organizing existing content to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.
Content organization: Structuring your website’s content in a logical and user-friendly way, making it easy for your visitors to navigate and find what they are looking for.
Content maintenance: Keeping your website’s content up-to-date, removing outdated or irrelevant information, and updating, revising, and archiving content to keep it accurate, relevant, and useful.
Content governance: Setting guidelines, policies, and standards for creating, managing, and publishing content on your website, and ensuring that all content on the website adheres to legal and ethical guidelines and company policies.
Multiple authors and contributors: Managing the contributions of multiple authors and ensuring consistency and quality across all content.
Integration with other systems: Integrating your content management system with other systems such as CRM, analytics, or e-commerce platforms.
Multilingual content management: Managing content in multiple languages for your website catering to a diverse audience.
Content security and backups: Protecting your website’s content from unauthorized access, complying with data privacy regulations, and ensuring that regular backups are made to restore the content in case of unfortunate events.
Measuring and analyzing performance: Tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates to measure the success and effectiveness of your content management efforts.
Addressing The Challenges Of Managing Your Content
According to digital marketing experts, your business should use content marketing to promote and market itself using content, and you should do this by:
Publishing new content regularly on your blog and on social media,
Sending out regular email newsletters to your subscribers (and your email marketing should be segmented to different users – i.e. prospects, customers, partners, etc.)
Creating special reports, and guides to generate new leads for your businesses.
But that’s not all…
Your business should also be continually creating new content targeting different audiences using tweets, pins, stories, videos, audio, infographics, slides, webinars, etc.
And your content must not only engage, entertain, delight, inform, educate, and sell, but if you want your content to rank well in the search engines, it must also be original, authoritative, expertly written, well-researched, and able to satisfy all the needs of your audience (or different audience groups).
That’s asking a lot of any business. Especially businesses with limited budgets and resources.
And once you figure out how to create (and meet the cost of creating) all this content…
How do you manage all of this content you have created?
How do you keep your content organized, up-to-date, and accessible so that anyone who needs it can quickly and easily access it without wasting time searching for it or duplicating it?
Managing all the content in your business requires setting up effective systems and processes for content planning, content production, and content promotionbefore you even start planning, creating, or promoting any content.
Without these systems and processes, your business is just guessing what may or may not work and hoping this will lead to great results.
Creating content without a plan, without defined targets, and without systems for measuring its performance and results is like throwing bricks into an empty yard and hoping these will somehow arrange themselves into a beautiful house.
This would be a complete waste of time, effort, money, and resources, wouldn’t you agree?
The More Content You Have, The More Content You Have To Manage
Suppose you have a blog and you regularly publish new content on it.
In just a few short years, your blog could have hundreds or even thousands of existing posts. Many of these posts will eventually contain information that needs updating, rewriting, or removing.
You can’t stop creating new content, but as your content gets old, you also have to keep maintaining it.
Managing the existing content in your business is like painting bridges. Maintaining the structure fresh and up-to-date to make sure it remains standing while everything around is trying to corrode it is an ongoing process.
So many factors can affect your existing content.
For example:
Facts, stats, and prices are continually changing,
Companies, brands, and platforms appear, evolve, get acquired, change names, or collapse,
External pages that your content links to (and are out of your control) are constantly being added, modified, moved, or removed,
And many other things.
Keeping track of all your existing content to see if anything has changed (and if so, what has changed) is a massive challenge, especially as your business matures and your web presence becomes more established.
The Solution: Develop And Implement An Effective Content Management System
If…
Your business needs a web presence,
Your web presence needs web content,
Your content needs management, and
The more content you have, the more content you have to manage…
Then the challenge for your business is to figure out not only how it can keep pumping out new content regularly, but also how it can proactively maintain all of its existing content updated, relevant, and accurate, in addition to managing all of its content-related processes and activities, while working within its current business setup.
Assessing Your Current Content Management Practices
As we have just seen…
Effective content management involves managing both the planning, production, and promotion of new content and the ongoing maintenance of existing content, throughout your entire organization.
So, is your business ready to manage its content effectively?
Think about all the areas of your business that are involved in the planning, creation, delivery, distribution, and promotion of your content, and ask yourself these questions:
How quickly can your business create and publish new content?
How does your business keep a pipeline of new content going?
How does your business keep the information in your existing content (across all content types and distribution channels) up-to-date, relevant, and accurate?
How do you know when your content is out of date, has become irrelevant, inaccurate, or obsolete?
How can you tell if your content is performing well?
How do you keep your content processes documented, organized, and accessible so anyone who needs the information can quickly and easily locate it?
How can you tell if your team members are implementing and following effective content management processes?
How quickly can your business adapt to incorporate new content planning, production, and promotion processes, strategies, methods, and tools?
The above answers will help you develop an effective Content Management Strategy, which is outlined below.
Your Content Management Strategy
The first step to managing content effectively in your business is to develop a content strategy.
Without this blueprint to guide your content activities and direction, your business will be like a rudderless ship.
While you are doing this, your team should also be documenting your content processes, tracking your content’s performance, and periodically reviewing your content to make sure it’s still aligned with your business objectives.
Additionally, your business needs to think about doing all this in an organized way while protecting and regularly backing up its content.
Your Content Management Plan
After creating your content strategy and content plan, the next step is to break your overall content plan down into smaller plans for content production, content promotion, and content management.
Your content management plan is a document that outlines the process and procedures for managing and maintaining the content that your business produces.
It typically includes your goals and objectives for your content, your target audience, the types of content to be produced, the distribution channels to be used, the roles and responsibilities of team members, the workflow and approval process, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your content management practices.
Your business needs a content management plan because it helps you to efficiently and effectively manage the content that you produce, from the initial idea to the final publication.
It also allows for a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of team members and stakeholders and establishes a consistent workflow, which helps to ensure that your content is accurate, on-brand, and on-time.
Also, a content management plan allows your business to track the performance of your content over time, and make adjustments as needed to ensure that you are meeting your content goals and reaching your target audience effectively.
Furthermore, a content management plan can help your business ensure that your content is organized, easily searchable, and retrievable, which can save time and resources in the long run, and provide a consistent customer experience.
Additionally, having a content management plan in place will help your business keep your content up-to-date and accurate, avoid duplication of effort, and ensure compliance with legal or regulatory requirements.
In short, your content management plan is a strategy for organizing, storing, and maintaining your business content.
It helps your business keep its content organized, ensuring that it stays up-to-date and relevant, and making it easily accessible to those who need it.
Content Management Plan Goals & Objectives
Common content management plan goals and objectives include:
Content organization: The goal is to create a structure and system for organizing and categorizing content in a way that makes it easy for users to find and access. This can be achieved by using tags and categories to organize blog posts and creating a hierarchical file system for document management.
Content creation: The goal is to create and publish new content that is relevant, valuable, and engaging for the target audience. This can be achieved by writing and publishing blog posts, creating and publishing videos, and creating and publishing infographics.
Content optimization: The goal is to improve the visibility and performance of existing content through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This can be achieved by researching and including relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, and creating internal and external links.
Content distribution: The goal is to reach and engage the target audience through various channels such as social media, email, and other digital platforms. This can be achieved by sharing content on social media, sending newsletters, and creating and sharing infographics on social media platforms.
Content measurement and analytics: The goal is to track and measure your content’s performance in terms of engagement, conversion, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This can be achieved by using Google Analytics to track website traffic, using social media analytics to track engagement, and using A/B testing to optimize conversion rates.
Content governance: The goal is to ensure that all content is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
Content archiving: The goal is to preserve and protect historical content for future reference. This can be achieved by keeping a record of all previous blog posts, preserving old videos, and archiving all previous documents and files.
How To Create A Content Management Plan
Here are the steps you can follow to create a content management plan for your business:
Inventory your content: Perform a content audit and create a list of all the content your business currently has, including the format, title, and location of each piece.
Identify the types of content: Group your content into categories, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, etc. This will make it easier to manage and keep track of.
Create a content schedule: Decide how often you will update and republish each type of content. This will help ensure that your content stays current and relevant.
Establish a process for creating and publishing content: Develop a workflow for creating and publishing new content, and make sure that everyone who creates content knows what is expected of them.
Create a system for storing and sharing content: Decide on a way to store and share your content, such as a content management system (CMS) or shared drive.
Define roles and responsibilities: Assign roles and responsibilities for content management to the appropriate people or teams within your organization.
Regularly review and update your plan: Regularly review and update your content management plan as needed to ensure that it is still effective.
Example Of A Content Management Plan
Here is an example of what a simple content management plan for a SaaS company that creates marketing software might look like:
Inventory: Blog posts, case studies, webinars, product demos, whitepapers
Types of content: Blog posts, case studies, webinars, product demos, whitepapers
Content schedule:
Blog post: Once a week
Case study: Once a month
Webinar: Once a quarter
Product demos: Once a quarter
Whitepaper: Once a year
Process:
Research: Marketing team
Writing: Marketing team
Editing: Marketing team
Design: Graphic designer
Publishing: Marketing team
Storage: Google Drive
Roles and responsibilities:
Content management: Marketing team
Content scheduling: Marketing team
Content publishing: Marketing team
By following these steps and regularly monitoring your results, the SaaS company will be able to create a content management plan that will help them keep their content organized, ensure that it stays up-to-date and relevant, and make it easily accessible to the people who need it.
Content Management Checklist
Define your content management goals: Clearly define the goals for managing the content, such as improving website traffic or increasing customer engagement.
Create a content inventory: Create an inventory of all existing content, including the format, topic, and target audience.
Develop a content strategy: Develop a content strategy that outlines the goals, target audience, topics, and formats for the content.
Establish a content workflow: Establish a content workflow that outlines the process for creating, reviewing, editing, and publishing content.
Set up a content calendar: Set up a content calendar that outlines the publishing schedule for your content.
Optimize for SEO: Optimize your content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
Track and analyze: Use analytics tools to track the performance of your content and gather insights for future content management.
Review and update: Review and update your content on a regular basis to ensure it stays fresh and relevant.
Collaborate and communicate: Collaborate and communicate with other teams and stakeholders to ensure the content aligns with the overall company goals and objectives.
If your business is already underway and your content management practices have started to become chaotic and disorganized, then we recommend going through our Content Troubleshooting Guide.
The email lessons will guide you through the course and provide the information you need to start managing your content effectively.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts (containing practical information and valuable content management tips) are added to our blog.
Content Management – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content management:
What is content management?
Content management involves the creation, organization, publication, and governance of digital content with a unified strategy to meet specific business goals. It encompasses tools, processes, workflows, and technologies to help individuals or teams streamline content production and distribution.
What are the key components of effective content management?
Effective content management relies on clear goals, well-defined workflows, collaboration tools, version control, metadata management, and analytics for continuous improvement.
What are the common challenges in managing content effectively?
Common challenges include content fragmentation, inconsistent workflows, poor version control, lack of collaboration, content governance issues, and difficulties in measuring content performance.
How can businesses streamline content creation?
Businesses can streamline content creation by defining clear objectives, creating content calendars, establishing editorial guidelines, leveraging content templates, and using collaborative tools for efficient content production.
What are the best practices for organizing digital content?
Best practices include implementing a taxonomy and metadata strategy, using consistent naming conventions, organizing content hierarchically, implementing search functionality, and periodically auditing and updating content structure.
How can businesses ensure content quality?
Businesses can ensure content quality by establishing quality standards, conducting thorough reviews, leveraging style guides, implementing approval workflows, and providing training for content creators.
What role does content governance play in effective content management?
Content governance establishes policies, processes, and guidelines for content creation, publication, and maintenance to ensure consistency, compliance, and alignment with business objectives.
How can businesses measure the effectiveness of their content management efforts?
Businesses can measure effectiveness through key performance indicators (KPIs) such as traffic, engagement metrics, conversion rates, content reuse, and user feedback.
What are some strategies for effective content creation?
Plan your content strategically with a clear understanding of your target audience and goals. Use tools for content ideation, like keyword research and competitor analysis, and ensure consistency and quality in your content creation process.
How can I ensure my content meets quality standards?
Establish clear content guidelines, utilize content calendars for scheduling, conduct regular audits, and set up a process for peer reviews or editorial oversight.
What are the best practices for managing content updates and revisions?
Regularly review and update content to keep it relevant. Use version control systems to manage changes and maintain records of revisions. Ensure that updates are communicated effectively within your team and to your audience.
How do I optimize my FAQ page for effectiveness?
Your FAQ page should be easy to navigate, reflect your brand’s voice, and directly answer common questions. Organize questions logically or categorize them, and update the page regularly to include new or evolving questions.
Summary
All web content needs management and the more content you have, the more content you have to manage.
Before you can manage content effectively, however, you need systems and processes to manage all content-related areas of your business.
From creating high-quality and engaging content that aligns with your website’s goals to organizing and categorizing it in a way that is easy for users to navigate, managing content requires a strategic and systematic approach.
Additionally, maintaining and updating the content, ensuring adherence to legal and ethical guidelines, and integrating with other systems are also important aspects of content management.
Furthermore, measuring the performance, dealing with multiple authors and contributors, and ensuring the security and backup of the content are also significant challenges to be addressed.
Without a proper plan in place, managing content can be a time-consuming and complex task.
Action Steps
Review the lessons in this training module and begin to implement systems and processes for managing content effectively in your business.
Content reviews are the best way to ensure that you stay on top of managing your existing content as your digital presence grows.
Content Reviews
Content reviews are the best way to ensure that you stay on top of managing your existing content as your digital presence grows.
Content reviews are a vitally important part of effective content management.
In this lesson, we look at why, when, and how to conduct periodic content reviews to ensure that your content remains in alignment with your content strategy.
Content reviews are the process of evaluating and checking the quality and relevance of the content on your website or other digital platforms.
Why Do Content Reviews?
The goal of a content review is to ensure that your content is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant to your target audience and that it aligns with your company’s brand and messaging.
As mentioned in the overview lesson of the Content Management module of this course, effective content management involves managing both the production of new content and the management of existing content in your business.
Managing your existing content and making sure that it not only remains up-to-date and relevant to your audience but is also aligned with your content strategy is an ongoing process.
This process becomes even more necessary as your digital presence grows and more new content is added, giving you more existing content to manage.
The solution is to implement an effective and periodic content review process.
Performing in-depth content reviews is a vitally important part of effective content management.
Content Reviews Goals And Objectives
The goals and objectives of performing regular content reviews include:
Ensure accuracy and credibility: This goal aims to ensure that all the content and information presented on your website is accurate, credible, up-to-date, and relevant to your target audience. Examples include fact-checking, verifying and citing sources, and updating outdated information.
Improve readability and clarity: This goal focuses on making sure the content is easy to read, understand, engage with, and user-friendly. Examples include using simple language, breaking up content into smaller sections, and using headings, subheadings, and formatting to improve readability.
Remove duplicate or low-value content: This goal aims to remove duplicate or low-value content that can dilute the user’s experience. Examples include identifying and removing duplicate content, consolidating similar content, and removing irrelevant or low-value content.
Increase search engine visibility: This goal focuses on improving your website’s search engine rankings in order to drive more organic traffic. Examples include optimizing meta tags, adding keywords, creating high-quality helpful content, and ensuring that your content is well-structured.
Increase user engagement: This goal focuses on making the content more engaging and interactive to increase user engagement. Examples include using multimedia and interactive elements and encouraging user feedback and comments.
Ensure consistency and brand alignment: This goal aims to ensure that all content is consistent with your brand’s voice, tone, and style. Examples include creating a style guide, reviewing for consistency in voice and the use of branding elements, and ensuring that all images and videos align with your brand.
Improve website navigation: This goal focuses on making your website easy for users to navigate and find the content they are looking for. Examples include creating a clear and consistent website structure, improving website navigation, reviewing for broken links, and ensuring that all pages are linked and that all links are working correctly.
Address user feedback: This goal aims to address any user feedback or complaints and make necessary changes to improve the website. Examples include monitoring social media and website comments, reviewing user feedback, and making changes based on user feedback.
Monitor analytics to identify gaps: This goal focuses on monitoring your website’s analytics to gain insights into user behavior, improve performance, and identify gaps in the content. Examples include setting up Google Analytics, setting up tracking codes, tracking website traffic, monitoring bounce rates, and regularly monitoring and analyzing website metrics.
Improve accessibility: This goal aims to make your website and web content accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. Examples include reviewing for accessibility issues, providing alternative text for images, using captioning and transcripts for videos, and using semantic HTML.
The Content Review Process
During a content review, you or a member of your content team should go through all of the content on your website and check for errors, inconsistencies, and areas that need improvement.
This may include fact-checking, verifying sources, and updating outdated information. Your team should also check for readability, user engagement, and how well your content is optimized for search engines.
Performing a content review may include different steps such as:
Identifying the content that needs to be reviewed.
Assigning a team or individual to perform the review.
Setting up a schedule for the review.
Reviewing the content and making notes and recommendations.
Implementing changes and updates to the content.
Testing the changes and monitoring the results.
Developing Your Content Review Process
Before you can embark on a proper review of your existing content, make sure that you already have your Content Strategy and Content Production systems in place.
Without these systems, you won’t know what you are aiming toward or how to get there.
Once these systems are in place, the next step is to conduct a thorough Content Audit of your existing content.
This would result in a document listing every existing item of content in your business that is used to grow your business.
Note: To make this lesson practical, we’ll confine our Content Audit examples to website content only and use screenshots generated from the author’s work as the blog editor of a technology company’s website.
What Exactly Are You Reviewing?
Before we look at how to run a content review, let’s briefly review exactly what you should be looking at when reviewing your content.
You know that your content has to meet the following criteria:
Provide your target audience what they are looking for.
Provide search engines what they are looking for.
Provide your business what it is looking for.
So, your content review is about ensuring that:
Your target audience will find your content to be 100% valuable, useful, informative, up-to-date, and accurate, and turn to your site for solutions to their questions, problems, and needs.
Search engines will find your content to be authoritative and 100% relevant to what users are searching for, and reward you with content that ranks increasingly higher in their search results, and delivers you consistent organic traffic.
Your business will achieve its strategic objectives, e.g. get more leads, sales, and conversions using content.
To achieve the above, the focus of your content review should be to make sure that all of the areas listed below deliver the best possible results when users and search engines land on your content:
Article outlines and structures make complete sense to readers and are fully optimized for search engines.
Headlines are compelling and lead to users clicking through to the rest of the article.
The introductory section describes succinctly what the content is all about and what readers can expect to gain from reading it.
Articles have a clickable table of contents. Readers can jump to the section they are interested in quickly.
The content structure is skimmable. Readers can quickly understand what the article is all about.
Stats, references, and citations are accurate and up-to-date.
The content is readable and easy to comprehend.
Internal links lead to useful and relevant content.
Graphics add value to users.
CTA used in the content has proven to convert well.
The content matches the overall query intent of the user.
Reading the content aloud makes perfect sense.
Content has been fact-checked by a subject matter expert (SME).
Now that you know what you should be looking for in your content, let’s look at how to set up and run effective content reviews.
Your Content Audit Results
One of the most effective ways to document and present your content audit results is to use a spreadsheet.
You can add as much detail to your Content Audit spreadsheet as you like, but we recommend adding two distinct sections to your audit after listing all of your content items (one per row):
SEO Analysis
Create columns to record the results of all of your meaningful content SEO metrics for each content item, e.g.:
Content analysis metrics
Keyword performance metrics
Traffic performance metrics
Engagement metrics
Conversion metrics
SEO performance metrics are important because any changes you make to your content can impact your SEO results.
Incidentally, this also makes things more challenging when it comes to making decisions to improve your content.
For example, what happens if improving your content results in lower search rankings, less traffic, or fewer conversions?
Content Analysis
In this section, add columns where you simply indicate with an “X” which action you recommend taking for each post/article as you go through and review these.
For example:
Trash – Select this column if you are going to trash the article (because it has no traffic, no backlinks, the content is obsolete, etc.).
Redirect – Select this column if you are going to redirect visitors landing on this article to another article. For more information on redirecting articles, see further below.
Fix – If most of the content is fine but there are some minor glaring issues (e.g. spelling or grammatical errors, a sentence or paragraph that should be removed or added, links that need to point to different pages, etc.) and it would take no more than 15-30 minutes to fix this, then mark the item as a “quick fix” (or just fix it on the spot).
Update – If sections of the content are outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete and it would take more than an hour or so to fix these, the item may need to be scheduled for an update.
Rewrite – If the topic is worth preserving but the content contains mostly outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete information that would require a complete rewrite to fix, then the item may need to be scheduled for a rewrite.
Leave As Is – If the content is fine and performing well, you may simply want to leave it as is. Or, this could be an old announcement post where the content is outdated but has historical value for the company and so the decision is to leave it as it is.
Query – Select this column if you are not sure what to do with the article and need to consult other members of your team (e.g. an editor, SEO analyst, product manager, etc.
Comments – Use this column to add notes if you feel a need to further explain your rationale for why you recommend taking such an action or record important things about the item to keep in mind.
Once you have added this information to your audit document, assigned members of your team can then go through each piece of content, review, classify, and make recommendations, and decision-makers can then act on those recommendations in alignment with your content strategy.
Example: Blog Post Audit
Below is a screenshot taken from a section of a content audit performed for a popular technology blog containing over 3,000+ published posts.
This blog generates millions of visits each year and ranks for tens of thousands of industry-related keywords.
As no content audit had previously been done on the company’s blog, this was a massive project, so here’s how we made it doable:
First, we divided all the blog articles into the years they were published (e.g. 2010, 2011, 2012, etc.), all the way to the present year.
We then added these posts to worksheets for each year and assigned these worksheets to each content team member to review.
Blog posts were assigned to worksheets in the audit spreadsheet according to the year they were published.
Use Color Schemes
Next, we agreed on a color-coding scheme to make it easier to determine ‘at-a-glance’, the status of each content item, and what (if any) action was required.
For example:
Green: Completed. This item has either already been fixed, reviewed, and approved by the blog editor or another role assigned the responsibility of making a final decision. In other words, this item’s action is completed and there is nothing else to do.
Yellow: Currently Being Worked On. This item has been scheduled for a quick fix, update, or rewrite, scheduled to a writer, and is currently being worked on.
Orange: Fixed – Needs Review. This item has been worked on and just needs someone to review it. If everything is ok, then the item gets marked green (i.e. completed).
Pink: Has Problems That Need Addressing. If a member assigned the task of reviewing this content item can’t decide what should be done with the article, then they tick the “Query” column for that item, add their notes in the “Comments” column, and highlight the item row in pink before moving onto the next item.
Blue: Redirection. The content reviewer has determined that this item should be redirected to another article or blog post. Here are the criteria used to make a redirection decision: if the old article has significant traffic and backlinks but the content is too outdated, irrelevant, or beyond saving, and there is a similar article or post that visitors can be redirected to, then it’s best to redirect this post to the other post. The reviewer should then add the suggested destination article to redirect this post to in the “Comments” section.
You can assign whichever review criteria you want to assign to content items.
In larger companies, different departments or teams may choose to create their own criteria and assign their own color schemes to mean different actions.
In this case, we recommend documenting this using the spreadsheet’s comments feature so that the color code explanations are viewable by hovering over each column header.
You can add your color code explanation to the Audit spreadsheet’s Status column and make it viewable as a tooltip.
In fact, we recommend adding comments to all the column headings in your spreadsheets so there is no confusion about what your content team is required to do. This is another great way to document your workflow processes.
Adding comments to spreadsheet column headers is a great way to document your workflow processes.
Divide Large Tasks Into Smaller Projects
When performing a complex review or content audit for the first time, you may want to break the task down into smaller projects.
For example, some of your subtasks may include:
Review article URLs to improve SEO or check if content can be made evergreen (to save having to update it again).
Review content images for licensed use of media (to avoid licensing/copyright infringements) meta descriptions for SEO (e.g. image alt tags), etc.
Check if articles have consistent elements (e.g. featured images, correctly formatted sections, a table of content with jump links, calls-to-action, etc.)
Replace product or brand names, links to outdated products, update/remove pricing information, etc.
You can create as many subtasks as you like by simply adding new worksheets to your spreadsheet and populating each worksheet’s rows and columns with the information you need to review.
Add new worksheet tabs for content review subtasks.
In the example we are looking at in this lesson, any time the content team is asked to review and change something throughout the blog (e.g. change links from the paid version of some products to their free version), a new worksheet is created specifically for handling that subtask.
Assign Priority Codes
After creating your main task spreadsheet (or subtask worksheet), you can assign priority codes to a column if you need to further segment the task into tasks that are urgent and should be worked on immediately vs non-urgent items that can be worked on when there is some spare time or items that will take longer to resolve.
For example, you could create a “Solution” or “Recommendation” column and assign a 1-2-3 priority code to items as follows:
Work on these immediately (quick wins, e.g. a quick fix or update). These may be assigned to high-traffic or high-converting articles containing wrong information or content that is outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete.
Schedule these into workflow (require more time, e.g. a content rewrite)
Loads of issues or problems (carefully review and assess these items before going any further).
Add a column to your content review spreadsheet to prioritize tasks if required.
As you review each item, add notes in the “Comments” column when appropriate or necessary. These notes will not only help you remember why you made the recommendation but it also helps others to understand the rationale behind your recommendation and to take over the project if required.
Add a “Notes” column to your review spreadsheet where team members can jot down notes, comments, reminders, and recommendations.
Classify Your Content
If you are performing a content audit for the first time, it may also help to review and classify your content into main categories and subcategories.
This will help your business understand and identify:
What content topics you have (or have not) already published content about.
Which industry or niche topics to focus on for improving SEO rankings.
How many articles have been written on a similar or related topic (and checked for duplicate content or consolidated into authoritative articles).
How to better organize your content for SEO using silos, topic clusters, pillar pages, internal linking, etc.
Missing gaps in your overall content plan and new content opportunities.
Content reviews provide a great opportunity to review and reorganize your content categories.
As you work on the review process, you can schedule content updates and rewrites (or new content projects) based on its recommendations.
This also gives you an opportunity to make sure that your existing content and any future scheduled work are aligned with your strategic objectives.
Additional Review Tasks
Here are some additional tasks (and subtasks) you may want to include in your Content Review (create separate worksheets for these if required and prioritize accordingly):
Check For Broken & Suspicious Links
Broken links not only deter visitors from staying on and returning to your site, but they can also negatively impact your search engine rankings.
Also, suspicious links can cause serious harm through malware or phishing.
You can check for broken links using tools that will not only automate the process and save you time by scanning all the URLs on your site but also allow you to export the results.
Broken links in your content can impact your search results. Use broken link-checking tools to help you fix this.
For tools that can help you check and fix broken links, go here:
While not all the content you create will be “evergreen,” you can avoid creating long-term problems by making sure that your article URLs are evergreen.
For example, everything looks fine in the article below. The article URL (10-plugins-to-improve-your-wordpress-pages) matches the article title (10 Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Pages).
This blog URL matches the blog title, but…
The problem is that as time goes by, your content may change.
With the listicle below, for example, several years after it was published, many of the items covered in the article no longer exist or are no longer available, so the content was updated.
Now the article’s URL (120-free-premium-wordpress-themes) doesn’t reflect the title (60+ Free Premium WordPress Themes) or the content that visitors may expect to see after clicking from a link with the original URL to the updated content.
Visitors clicking through to the article may get confused or disappointed to find that the content contains a different number of items than shown in the article’s URL.
The solution is to make the article’s URL “evergreen” so that regardless of how often the content changes, it won’t affect the users’ experience or require the web address to be updated.
The content of this post can change as often as needed…adding more or fewer items to this article won’t affect its URL or visitors’ experience!
This is not only a good content SEO practice, but it will also save you time making changes to the content in the future.
To keep your article URLs evergreen, therefore, it’s best to avoid wherever possible using words in the post slug that will create issues if/when your content changes.
For example:
Amounts, Numbers, Quantities, etc.: e.g. use best-burger-restaurants-foodsville instead of the-best-14-burger-restaurants-in-foodsville. You can now promote as many burger restaurants as you want in your article regardless of how many new restaurants you remove or add to the list.
Dates: e.g. use best-air-fryer-recipes instead of best-air-fryer-recipes-2022. Keeping the post URL generic allows you to update your list and change the article’s title every year to keep it relevant without creating any problems.
New, Launched, Released, etc.: e.g. use portable-brand-name-coffee-maker instead of new-portable-brand-name-coffee-maker-released. This keeps your article’s URL relevant long after the newly launched product or service stops being “new”.
Redirect Trashed Posts
If you consolidate the content of two or more blog posts into one new article (e.g. to make it more comprehensive and authoritative), you may want to trash the old posts to prevent duplicate content.
A good practice when trashing old posts or changing URLs is to create a 301 Redirect. This automatically redirects any visitors clicking on the old URL to the new article location and instructs search engines to follow the new URL whenever they come across the old URL.
If your site uses WordPress, you can use a plugin like Redirection to easily add and manage URL redirects.
WordPress lets you easily manage URL redirections using a plugin.
Using tools to manage redirections is especially useful if you have an established web presence with thousands of published posts and trashed posts.
A redirection tool can help you manage thousands of redirected links and trashed post URLs.
Check For Design Consistency
Another subtask you can add to your content reviews is to skim through the page and check for consistent design elements as you review each article or blog post.
Some elements you can check include:
Featured images (e.g. hero banners)
Content images (e.g. size: too small or too large, visibility: are there errors preventing images from displaying on the page? content: is the image showing incorrect, irrelevant, or outdated information?)
Media (e.g. check that videos are not displaying a “this video has been removed and is no longer available” message.)
Calls-to-action (CTAs) – e.g. Is the content promoting an expired offer or a product that you no longer sell?
Other: e.g. check pricing information, the presence of broken code, etc.
For example, during our content review of the technology blog, we noticed that many older posts were missing feature banners.
On this particular blog, banner images display above the article’s title.
This blog post is missing a featured image above the Post title.
It’s easier to check for things like missing featured images while conducting the content review, so here’s how to address this issue.
First, add a new column to your main Content Review spreadsheet or create a subtask worksheet (or even a separate spreadsheet altogether) to track articles that need design elements to be fixed (e.g. create a post banner, fix media problems like embedded videos that no longer play or have been removed, etc.).
Create a new subtask using a spreadsheet.
Since you are already looking at the article, it should only take you a few additional seconds to notice something blatantly wrong or missing as you go through and review each content item and record it on your subtask list as a “to-do”.
Once you notice something missing on the page, even if you can’t see it, you can’t unsee it!
In this example (and as explained in the Workflow Documentation lesson), we work with a team of illustrators, so whenever article banners are required:
The person assigned to review the article adds the task to the “Banner required” spreadsheet, creates a task in the content production workflow tool (Jira), and pings the design team channel using the work communication tool (Slack) to notify them that a new job has been created.
Design team members work out amongst themselves who is available to take on the assignment. This is then noted on the spreadsheet using a color-coding system.
When the artwork has been created, the illustrator then provides a download link to the Design team’s artwork folder (Google Drive).
The team member who requested the artwork then uploads the banner to the article and marks the task as done on the subtask spreadsheet.
This old blog post now has a new banner image.
The content team member responsible for performing quality checks reviews the subtask spreadsheet periodically and clicks on each article link marked as “done” to make sure that each task has been completed successfully (i.e. check that a new banner has been added to the post) and did not get accidentally skipped or missed during the process.
This quality check also involves making sure that the artwork is visually suitable for the article topic, and consistent with branding guidelines, dimensions, resolution, etc.).
Use content reviews to check for consistency in your content’s design and essential elements like CTAs, formatting, etc.
Check Meta Content
While conducting the content review, it’s also important to perform certain content SEO checks, like:
Images: Check images for alt tags, captions, etc. (and either fix or improve anything that needs fixing on the spot or make a note in the comments section)
Content Formatting: Check for correctly formatted section headings (e.g. H1-H6)
Other: e.g. check for the presence of a Table of Contents with jump links to section headings.
Check images for alt tags and captions and fix or improve these wherever possible.
Check For Compliance Issues
If you outsource your content writing to external agencies, freelance writers, guest authors, etc. it’s important to make sure that your content is not going to get your site penalized by search engines or even get you into legal issues (e.g. copyright infringements, unauthorized use of images, etc.)
While conducting this kind of review can be quite elaborate and time-consuming, there are some things you can check for that won’t take as long, such as:
Make sure stock images are licensed: If your content uses stock images, make sure that you have the rights to use these in your content. If you can’t find the license or attribution or have any doubts about an image, it’s best to remove it from your content or replace it with an image that you do have the right to use and can prove if asked to do so.
Delete suspicious/spammy links: Unless you have entered into a prior agreement with the article writer, check and remove links that aren’t relevant, don’t make sense in the overall context of the content, or links that just shouldn’t be there (e.g. someone else’s promotional or affiliate links).
Disclaimers & Compliance – If your content does include affiliate links (e.g. Amazon), AdSense ads, etc. make sure that everything on your page complies not only with the policies of 3rd-party advertisers but also with state, federal, and legal requirements, such as adding disclaimers for site users, GDPR notices, etc.
Make sure that you have the rights to use stock images in your content.
If your site displays content hosted on external sites (e.g. embedded media, applications, code snippets, etc.), it’s important to make sure that:
The 3rd-party service is active and operational,
The embedded content is working normally
You have access to the external service account
Having access to the external account hosting your content is very important and should not be overlooked during the content review process.
For example, if we go back to the technology blog we’ve been using as an example in this lesson, some of the articles on the blog feature snippets of code.
Sometimes, these code snippets are added as regular content with some special formatting to make it stand out from the rest of the article’s content, as shown in the screenshot below.
Here is a code snippet added to the content as regular content…
Other times, however, code snippets are hosted externally and added to the blog’s content via a script or shortcode.
This is fine, except for the fact that previous blog writers who no longer work for the company had:
Set up accounts under their own names on these external services, then
Created the code snippets within their own accounts, and
Added this content to the blog articles via shortcodes linked to their own accounts.
This content is hosted externally and embedded from the account of an author who no longer works for the company.
Most of the company’s previous writers had followed this method, putting every externally-hosted snippet of code on the blog in peril.
While it’s completely understandable why the article writers would have done this (many were guest writers and it’s easier for them to work inside their own accounts when writing their articles), what this means is that if any code in any of the snippets embedded in the blog needs editing, the company’s content team cannot access the snippets to make the necessary changes on their own content because they don’t control or have access to those accounts.
So, if the original author(s), who are no longer with the company (and who may not be contactable) decide to either close or deactivate their account, then managing articles containing their embedded content becomes a serious issue for the company.
If this user closes his or her account, this content may need to be recreated from scratch.
The recommended solution was for the company to create its own account with the 3rd-party service, transfer all the code snippets found on its blog to its account, then replace all the embedding shortcodes found in all blog articles with their own shortcodes.
The company created its own account with the content-hosting service so all existing code snippets on its blog could be transferred from other users’ accounts.
As you can imagine, with thousands of published articles on the blog, this was quite an undertaking. It required a new and separate review of all the blog articles containing the embedded shortcode for this service.
Following the same content review process, we created a new worksheet for this subtask and assigned team members to go through and transfer all the content from the previous writers’ accounts to the company’s account.
Reviewing content may not be the highlight of a content manager’s life, but it definitely plays a big part in it!
After completing the transfer of content from a previous writer’s account to the company’s account and replacing the code snippet shortcode on the blog article, the team member marked the item as fixed and highlighted the item’s row in yellow.
Another team member then checked the articles highlighted in yellow to make sure that everything looked ok.
This content snippet was transferred successfully to the blog owner’s account.
After confirming that the content transfer was performed successfully, the item was then highlighted on the spreadsheet as green.
Every content snippet on the blog was checked to confirm that it was transferred to the site owner’s account.
This process continued until all items on the spreadsheet had been completed, checked, and marked as done.
All code snippets were transferred successfully. This review is done!
If planned and executed correctly, your Content Review document (e.g. a spreadsheet or other tool) becomes your master blueprint, allowing you to perform future content audits, reviews, and performance assessments against defined metrics more easily.
Initially, it’s a lot of work to get all this done, but it will save a lot of time in the future. It will also allow your business to make better (i.e. more strategic) decisions about your content and adapt faster to any changes affecting your business moving forward.
Content Review Setup
You can stay on top of the tasks and subtasks associated with performing a content review by:
Assigning the work to team members (if you have the resources available),
When and how often should you schedule content reviews?
Ideally, you should perform an initial content audit and then aim to do a periodic review of your content at least once a year.
The schedule for reviewing content that will work best for your organization, however, really depends on:
How much existing content you have already published
How much new content you are currently publishing or plan to publish
What kind of content your organization publishes (i.e. cornerstone, gated, evolving)
How much of your content is currently outdated, irrelevant, inaccurate, or obsolete
What resources are available to conduct a thorough content review and implement its findings.
Also, keep in mind that the process described in this lesson works for both periodic (i.e. repeated regularly) and one-time reviews.
One-Time Reviews
One-time reviews are done when your organization requires global changes to be made to your content or some form of “search and replace” across your entire site or a section of it.
Examples of this are:
Pricing changes (e.g. update or remove pricing information across your site)
Replace product/service/brand name changes or descriptions
Replace or remove calls-to-action, expired offers, etc.
Check for broken or suspicious links, specific content sections, design elements, offers or text added manually to content, content belonging to specific topics, categories, authors, etc.
Periodic Reviews
Periodic content reviews are designed to ensure that your content is being maintained up to standards.
Examples of regular reviews include:
Complete or partial content audits to check if the content is up-to-date, relevant, and accurate for its intended audience.
SEO reviews (e.g. analyze the Top 20 most visited/best-converting articles each month for content and SEO improvements).
Spam comment checking – this can be done daily, weekly, at the start and end of the week, etc.
Spam Comment Checking
If you plan to allow site visitors to leave comments on your blog posts, you are opening yourself up to receiving — and having to deal with — comment spam.
Comment spam can negatively impact your content SEO.
For this reason, we recommend taking the following into account when developing a process for reviewing and handling spam comments:
Is it Spam? Sometimes it’s difficult to assess whether comments and replies left on blog posts are actually spam or not. You will need to define which kinds of comments are ok to leave posted and which should be deleted from your posts.
Is it technical? Make sure to work out how to respond to comments left on your blog that require a reply from someone with technical knowledge about your products or services. This may involve reaching out to your technical team for a reply or asking technical members of your team to reply directly.
Is it content related? Does the comment or reply relate to the topic of the article? Or did the commenter simply find an opportunity to inject a spam comment?
Who should reply? Who is responsible for replying to comments left on your blog posts? Should the post’s author or the customer support team reply? What if the original post author no longer works for your company?
How quickly should you reply? After defining who replies to comments left on articles the next is to work out the maximum acceptable period for leaving comments unanswered (e.g. 48 hrs).
Here is a suggested process to make the content review simple and systematic:
We recommend you start the process by performing a thorough content audit listing all of your content items on a spreadsheet or other tool where you/your team will then record key information about each item.
Next, distribute and assign the work to those who are able to participate. Make sure to document what you are asking your team to review and assess either in the tool itself (e.g. using descriptive column names, tooltips, etc.) or in a shareable guide or document.
When team members review and assess each item, they should enter their recommendations by placing letters or marks in columns (e.g. “x” or ticking checkboxes if you want to add these), use color codes, assign priority numbers, type notes, comments, etc.
The sooner you begin implementing your content review process, the easier it will be to keep your existing content up-to-date.
Using a shared spreadsheet (e.g. Google Sheets) allows the process to be saved, so members can work on their assigned tasks a little bit each day or whenever they are not attending to other priorities, then leave and come back to the task, and pick things up again from where they left off.
Your content review spreadsheet is both a tool for tracking work progress and documenting the process itself.
As your spreadsheet records the total work progress, how much work is being completed per session, and who is accountable for it, this allows you to set some benchmarks and metrics for future content reviews (e.g. how many content items a team member can review in X amount of time).
The better you design the process initially, the less time it will take to complete subsequent reviews.
As each subtask is completed and marked off…
Once the review gathers momentum, it can be satisfying to see tasks are being completed.
You get closer and closer to completing the overall review…
This is content review nirvana!
So that ultimately, your business achieves the goal of thoroughly reviewing and updating your existing content.
Is there any greater satisfaction than seeing your content review spreadsheet go from this to this? You’ll look forward to doing it all over again next year!
Once your content review is completed, take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate your team for a great achievement, schedule the next content review on your content calendar (e.g. set it as a task to be done annually), and repeat this process all over again.
If performing a content review seems all too daunting, remember:
“Mile by mile, it’s a trial; yard by yard, it’s hard; but inch by inch, it’s a cinch.”
Gabrielle Giffords
Content Reviews – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content reviews:
What is a content review?
A content review is a thorough assessment of the text, images, videos, and other media on a website or in a content management system to ensure accuracy, relevance, compliance, and quality.
Why are content reviews important?
Content reviews help maintain the credibility and reliability of information presented, ensuring it meets the intended audience’s needs and complies with legal and ethical standards.
Who should perform a content review?
Content reviews should be performed by content specialists, editors, or subject matter experts familiar with the content’s context and the standards required for its presentation.
What does a content review involve?
A review involves checking for factual accuracy, grammatical correctness, style consistency, and compliance with regulatory standards. It may also include optimizing content for search engines and improving user engagement.
How often should content reviews be conducted?
The frequency of content reviews depends on the nature of the content. High-impact or frequently visited content might need more frequent reviews, while less critical material may be reviewed less often.
What tools can assist in content reviews?
Tools like content management systems, SEO platforms, grammar checkers, and plagiarism detectors can aid in efficient and effective content reviews.
How do you handle negative findings in a content review?
Address negative findings by revising the content accordingly, providing training for content creators, or implementing stricter quality controls to prevent future issues.
Can automated tools replace human content reviewers?
While automated tools can help streamline the review process and catch common errors, human judgment is essential for interpreting context and nuanced language, and for making strategic decisions about content.
What are the challenges in content reviewing?
Challenges include maintaining objectivity, managing large volumes of content, staying updated with the latest content standards, and balancing SEO with user experience.
What is the impact of not conducting content reviews?
Neglecting content reviews can lead to outdated or incorrect information, decreased user trust, legal repercussions, and a damaged brand reputation.
Summary
Content reviews are a critical step in ensuring that your website provides high-quality, valuable information to visitors, and they can also improve your overall website performance, user experience, and search engine visibility.
Regular content reviews are important to maintain the quality and relevance of your content, and to ensure that the website continues to meet the needs of your target audience.
Managing content effectively requires performing regular content reviews, so the best thing to do is to systematize it as soon as possible and integrate it into your overall content strategy.
Keeping track of all your existing content to see if anything has changed (and if so, what has changed) is a mammoth task, especially as your digital presence matures and becomes more established.
So many factors can affect your existing content. Facts, stats, and prices continually change. Companies, brands, and platforms appear, evolve, get acquired, change names, or collapse, products and services get added, modified, or dropped, externally-linked content gets moved or removed, and a host of other things can happen.
If you regularly publish new content, your website or blog can grow into hundreds or thousands of existing posts or articles in just a few short years, and many (if not most) will contain information that needs to be added, updated, or removed.
Content reviews are the best way to ensure that you stay on top of managing your existing content as your digital presence grows.
Action Steps
Perform an initial content audit of your website or blog’s content.
Review and implement the steps described in this lesson.
Schedule periodic maintenance reviews in your team’s content calendar.
Learn about the key content metrics to track to assess how well your content is performing for your business.
Content Metrics
Learn about the key content metrics to track to assess how well your content is performing for your business.
Do you know how well your content is performing and which metrics you should be tracking and measuring to ensure this?
In this lesson, we look at the key content metrics that will help your organization assess your content’s performance by content type and track performance in areas like:
Brand Awareness
Audience Engagement
Customer Retention & Loyalty
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Lead Generation
Sales
Additionally, we will look at other areas of content performance where knowing which metrics to track can be useful.
Before You Get Started
Getting results from your content marketing activities can take time. Nonetheless, it’s important to set clear goals, as these will help you determine what type of content your team needs to create and how often to publish. Defining measurable goals will also help you track your content’s progress and performance over time and provide you with insights on ways to adjust and improve your results.
These goals should include key performance indicators (KPIs) and the quantitative and qualitative metrics that will be used to measure content performance. Metrics should be relevant, actionable, and easy to measure.
KPIs vs Metrics
While all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the “key” metrics or benchmarks that let you measure how you are progressing toward specific goals. Metrics are the measurements. KPIs can also be comprised of multiple metrics.
KPIs can comprise various metrics. Source: HubSpot
While all metrics can provide data about your business or your activities (e.g. your content marketing performance), some metrics may be more valuable to your business than others, depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Some metrics may just be “vanity” metrics, i.e. they make you feel good, but they’re not very meaningful. For example, an article may get many “likes” on social media but result in no increase in business (i.e. no subscribers, leads, sales, etc.).
It’s important, therefore, to define which “key metrics” you will be tracking when assessing your content’s performance.
Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics
Quantitative metrics measure things like how much content your business produced and over what period of time. This can be used to determine ways to increase content production and look for processes and tools that will result in greater content production efficiency.
Qualitative metrics measure aspects of content consistency, such as how accurate and relevant your content is for your audience, how well they engage with it, and how satisfied they feel consuming it.
Industry Benchmarks
Knowing what kind of metrics others in your industry are averaging and using to measure their content’s performance can be useful to help you understand how well your content is performing.
For example, WordStream looked at the performance of Google paid search ads across 20 common industries to benchmark click-through rates (CTR). If your organization uses paid search advertising, knowing the average CTR for your industry can tell you a lot about your own ad campaigns.
Google Ads Industry Benchmarks. Source: WordStream.
Track Only The Metrics You Absolutely Need To Know
We live in a world of information and it’s easy to get lost in (or drown) in an ocean of “interesting” and “useful” data.
With content like social media, for example, there is so much information you can track.
“The great thing about social media is that you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics. The tough thing about social media is that… you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics.”
It’s important, then, to be very clear about the metrics that matter to your business.
One key aspect of creating an effective content strategy is defining the content metrics that will be used to measure the success of your content.
The content metrics you define are then used to track the performance of individual pieces of content, as well as the overall effectiveness of your content strategy.
Here are a few examples of content metrics that you can set as goals in your content strategy:
Traffic: The number of people who visit your website or a page on your site. This is a basic measure of the reach of the content and can be used to determine which pieces of content are the most popular.
Engagement: The amount of time people spend on your website or a page on your site, or the number of actions they take (such as commenting or sharing). This can be used to measure the quality and relevance of the content and how well it resonates with the audience.
Lead Generation: The number of leads generated from your website or landing page. This can be used to measure the effectiveness of the content in converting visitors into potential customers.
Sales: The number of sales generated from your website or landing page. This can be used to measure the effectiveness of the content in converting leads into customers.
Conversion: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. A goal for conversion might be to increase the number of visitors who make a purchase by a certain percentage.
Bounce Rate: These metrics measure the percentage of visitors who leave your website or page after only viewing a single page. A goal for Bounce Rate might be to decrease the percentage of visitors leaving your website or page without visiting other pages.
Return Visitors: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who return to your website or page. A goal for Return Visitors might be to increase the percentage of visitors who return to your website after their first visit.
Return on investment (ROI): The overall return on the investment made in creating, publishing, and promoting the content. This measure the overall effectiveness of your content strategy and can help in determining whether or not a content program is delivering results.
These are just a few examples, depending on your business, other metrics may be relevant such as :
Brand awareness,
Product adoption,
Referral traffic,
Social shares, etc.
Content metrics will vary by industry and organization. The important thing is to select metrics that are directly relevant to the specific business goals of your organization and align with your overall content strategy.
The sections below will point you to many useful resources on content metrics.
We recommend:
Visiting the links to the references and resources that apply specifically to the types of content your organization produces and publishes.
Familiarizing yourself with the metrics associated with these content types. Understand the terminology and what it means.
Deciding on the key metrics that you will track to measure your content’s performance.
There are a number of content promotion tracking tools and reports from various services you can use to measure your content’s performance when looking at metrics by content type.
For example, looking at the KPIs listed in the chart shown above for:
Blog Posts & Articles
All of the data listed above can be obtained from reports generated by tools like Google Analytics.
These articles provide more information on blog metrics:
Some of the key email metrics to track include open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, bounce rates, asset downloads, number of unsubscribes, list growth rate, churn rates, spam complaints, and more.
Email marketing providers like Aweber, Mailchimp, etc. provide tools for tracking these metrics.
These articles provide more information on email metrics:
Social media performance can be tracked using metrics like engagement, follower counts, impressions, reach, shares, response rates, comments, and more.
Social media platforms and many 3rd-party services provide useful reporting tools and analytics to help you track the performance of your social media content.
These articles provide more information on social media content metrics:
Important metrics that will help you track the performance of your video content include view counts, engagement, play rates, watch times, social shares, clicks, click-through rates, conversions, and more.
There are a number of tools and platforms you can use to track the success of your video campaigns, including YouTube, Facebook, etc.
These articles provide more information on video metrics:
The number of unique listeners, subscribers, downloads, rankings, reviews, social sharing, and episode-by-episode metrics are just some of the key metrics you can use to measure the success of your podcasts.
These articles provide more information on podcast metrics:
There are many metrics you can use to measure the success of your pay-per-click campaigns, including clicks, click-through rates (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), conversion rate (CVR), and lifetime value (LTV).
These articles provide more information on PPC campaign metrics:
Here are some of the main metrics to track when measuring your content’s performance:
Brand Awareness Metrics
Website traffic
Page/Unique Page views
Video views
Document views
Downloads
Social chatter
Referral links
Audience Engagement Metrics
Blog & social comments
Likes/shares/tweets/retweets/pins, etc.
Follower counts
Forwards
Inbound links
Customer Retention & Loyalty Metrics
Percentage of content consumed by existing customers
Retention/renewal rates
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Metrics
Keyword ranking
Backlinks
Organic search traffic
Top exit pages for organic traffic
Breakdown of organic traffic from search engines
Page views per user
Average time on page
New vs. returning users
Bounce rate
Page speed
Conversion rate
Page Authority (PA)
Domain Authority (DA)
Lead Generation Metrics
Form completions and downloads
Email subscriptions
Blog subscriptions
Conversion rate
Leads generated
Lead quality/score
Existing leads influenced
Sales Metrics
Demo requests
Funnel conversion rate
Pipeline generated
Revenue influenced
Online sales
Offline sales
Manual and anecdotal reporting
Sales for new products/services (upsells and cross-sells)
Sales conversion rate
Sales cycle length
Content Marketing Metrics
Depending on the content marketing strategy that best suits your business, you may want to track and pay attention to different metrics.
For example, for B2C content marketing campaigns, you may want to focus on metrics like:
Social Engagement
Website Traffic
Conversion Rate
Lead Quality
Customer Retention and Loyalty
Marketing Revenue and Sales
Marketing ROI
Whereas B2B campaigns may also include tracking metrics like:
Current stats:
Total social impressions for recent posts
Total views for recent posts
Total conversions for recent posts (email subscribers, free trial sign-ups, purchases, etc.)
Number of social media shares for recent posts
Benchmarks and trends:
Changes in reading time versus the previous time period
Changes in bounce rate versus the previous time period
Number of active email subscribers versus the previous time period
Highest performing content:
Top 20 posts with the highest views
Top 20 posts with the highest read time
Top 20 posts with the highest conversions (email subscribers, free trial sign-ups, purchases, etc.)
Other Content Performance Metrics
Additional content performance metrics to track include:
Consumption Metrics: Metrics like page views, unique visitors, average time on page, and behavior flow tell you how many people view and consume your content, and how much time they spend engaging with it.
Website Engagement Metrics: Inbound links, session duration, page depth, and click-through rate (CTR) can tell you how interested your audience and site visitors are in engaging with your content and what you have to offer.
Retention Metrics: Return rates, pages per visit, and bounce rates tell you how well your website is retaining visitors.
Content Production Metrics: Tracking the time spent on content creation and its performance over time can help to inform decisions and choices about future content creation.
Cost Metrics: Cost per content piece and distribution costs let you track how much your content marketing activities are costing your business.
Which Content Metrics Are Right For Your Organization?
Ultimately, the metrics your organization chooses to track to assess content performance will depend on which content promotion strategies it uses and which KPIs it choose to measure.
For example, while SEO, paid advertising, and content marketing can all deliver benefits to an organization in terms of content promotion, each strategy requires different time frames to assess the results of its campaigns and uses different content metrics to track performance.
Content marketing and SEO are a longer-term strategy than paid advertising and pinpointing an ROI for long-term strategies is more difficult than something that yields more immediate results, such as paid ads.
The infographic below shows a number of metrics and KPIs that are useful for measuring the performance of your content marketing strategy.
Infographic: 15+ Content Marketing Metrics to Measure Performance. Source: Agency Analytics. Click on the image above to view a larger version.
Here’s another approach suggested by Semrush for tracking content metrics, which measures 4 key groups (user behavior, engagements, SEO outcome, and company revenue):
Infographic: Essential Content Marketing Metrics to Track. Source: Semrush. Click on the image above to view a larger version.
Content Metrics – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content metrics:
What are content marketing metrics?
Content marketing metrics are measures used to assess the performance of your content strategy. They help determine how well your content engages with your audience and achieves your marketing goals.
Why are content marketing metrics important?
Metrics are crucial because they provide insights into the effectiveness of content in engaging audiences, generating leads, and driving conversions. They help marketers optimize strategies for better results.
Which metrics should I track for audience engagement?
For audience engagement, focus on metrics like page views, time on page, bounce rate, social shares, and comments. These indicators reflect how compelling and relevant your audience finds your content.
What metrics are best for measuring content reach?
Track reach through metrics such as unique visitors, impressions, and the geographical distribution of your audience. These help you understand the breadth of your content’s influence.
How can I measure lead generation from my content?
Measure lead generation by tracking metrics like form submissions, newsletter signups, and downloads. Analyze which pieces of content most often lead to these actions to identify what attracts potential customers.
What are the key metrics for assessing conversion rates?
For conversions, important metrics include conversion rate from specific calls-to-action, the number of sales directly linked to content pieces, and overall ROI from content campaigns. This shows the economic value your content brings.
How do I use Google Analytics for content metrics?
Google Analytics can track many content metrics, including traffic sources, user behavior on-site, and conversions. It provides detailed insights to optimize your content based on performance data.
Can content metrics improve SEO?
Yes, analyzing metrics like organic search traffic, click-through rates, and keyword rankings can provide insights to enhance your SEO strategy, making content more visible and effective in search engines.
Summary
Content metrics help you track how well your content is performing and measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
Selecting metrics to measure your content marketing activities requires identifying your core objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Action Steps
Review this lesson and your organization’s content strategy. Create a list of the most important metrics to track to ensure that your content marketing strategy aligns with defined KPIs to meet the strategic goals and objectives of your business.
Resources
Content Tracking – Refer to the “content tracking tools” section of this lesson for links to useful tools to help you track content metrics.
In order to grow with content, your business needs a content strategy.
After implementing a content strategy, the question to ask is…”how do you know the content strategy is working?”
In other words, how can you tell if your content-related activities are delivering results? If so, what kind of results? And are these results helping your business meet its goals and objectives? Is the content helping your business to grow?
Your business can only know if its content strategy is working if it has defined specific content metrics and benchmarks and can observe these being met.
“How can you observe if your content metrics and benchmarks are being met?”
Simple…
By tracking the results of all your content-related activities, then measuring and comparing these against the content metrics and benchmarks you have defined to make sure that all your content processes, activities, and results align with your content strategy.
Content tracking helps you determine if your content strategy is working.
Benefits Of Tracking Content Performance
Tracking content performance can provide a variety of benefits, including the ability to:
Measure the effectiveness of different types of content: By tracking metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversion rates, you can determine which types of content are resonating with your audience and which are not. This information can be used to inform your future content strategy decisions.
Identify audience demographics: Tracking metrics like demographics and location can help you understand who is engaging with your content and tailor your messaging accordingly.
Optimize content distribution: By monitoring metrics such as click-through rates, you can determine which channels and platforms are driving the most traffic to your content and adjust your distribution strategy accordingly.
Improve ROI: By tracking metrics such as conversion rates and revenue generated, you can determine the ROI of your content marketing efforts (see further below) and adjust your strategy to maximize return on investment.
Track competitors: By monitoring key metrics of your competitors’ content, you can identify opportunities to differentiate your own content and gain an edge in the marketplace.
Examples:
You create a blog post and track metrics like page views, time on page, and bounce rate to determine how well the post is performing.
You create a video and track metrics like views, engagement, and shares to see how well your video is resonating with your audience.
You create a landing page and track metrics like form submissions and conversion rates to determine how effective it is at generating leads.
Content Metrics
The term content metrics is often used to describe metrics used to track content marketing results, such as how well content is performing on social media, how much traffic it generates, and what kind of sales or leads are being generated by the content used to support those marketing activities.
Before you can promote your content, however, you need to create it.
After you’ve created and promoted your content, you need to manage it.
Tracking the effectiveness of your content’s performance to determine the success of your content strategy, therefore, requires setting relevant and actionable metrics and benchmarks for all content-related areas of your business, not just content marketing.
We have created a separate lesson on this topic here: Content Metrics
Measuring Content ROI
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing activities can be challenging, as it can be difficult to attribute specific revenue or conversions directly to individual pieces of content.
However, there are several methods that you can use to measure content ROI, including:
Attribution modeling: This method involves assigning a percentage of the credit for a conversion to various touchpoints in the customer journey, such as a specific piece of content. This can help determine the overall impact of content on conversions.
Lead generation: By tracking the number of leads generated from specific pieces of content, you can determine the ROI of your content in terms of the cost per lead.
Sales: By tracking the number of sales generated from specific pieces of content, you can determine the ROI of your content in terms of the cost per sale.
Engagement: By tracking metrics like page views, time on page, and bounce rate, you can determine the level of engagement your content is generating, and use this information to inform future content strategy decisions.
Brand awareness: By tracking metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, and mentions in the press, you can determine the impact of your content on brand awareness.
It is important to note that measuring ROI of content is not always straightforward, and may require a combination of metrics and methods to get a clearer picture. Also, ROI calculation should be in line with your overall business goals and objectives.
Content Tracking Tools
After defining which content metrics you will track to help you determine if your content is aligned with your content strategy, you need tools to help you track and measure how your content production, content promotion, and content management efforts are performing.
No single tool can help you track all of the above, so let’s look at various tools and options you can use to set up tracking systems for each of these areas.
Content Production Tracking Tools
Your content production tools should have built-in features that allow you to track workflow metrics, measure content production efficiency, and report on things like:
How many projects are currently in content production?
How many projects per status? (e.g. new, draft, in review, on hold, etc.)
How many projects has each team member been assigned?
How many projects have been completed per member and in total during X time period?
How long does it take on average to complete a project in a specific content type (e.g. a blog article or video)?
How many projects have unresolved issues? What are these unresolved issues? What’s causing these unresolved issues?
How much work is yet to be completed per member and in total?
How many projects were not completed within their allocated timeframe? What is the reason? (e.g. technical holdups, lack of resources, unrealistic expectations set, etc.)
How is the workload distribution? Is the work being distributed fairly between team members? If not, why?
Track content production metrics using tools that let you calculate content production efficiency.
There are many tools available for tracking content performance. Here are just some of these tools:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides free access to insights and useful reports for tracking all your content marketing metrics and accessing content performance.
We recommend using Google Analytics together with other content performance tracking tools.
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is another free tool from Google that gives you powerful insights into your website’s performance from various data sources like Google Search, Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube, social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, databases, etc.
Looker Studio demo.
For example, while Google Search Console provides data and insights about your website’s performance in Google Search, understanding this data and extracting actionable insights from it can be challenging.
Looker Studio turns your data into informative, easy-to-read, and fully customizable and shareable dashboards and reports with Search Console data visualizations to help you make better data-driven decisions.
Looker Studio provides a range of dashboard templates that allow you to interpret data and improve your content performance.
Looker Studio’s drag-and-drop report editor lets you visualize your data in seconds with charts and tables, create interactive reports with viewer filters and date range controls, include links and clickable images to create product catalogs, video libraries, and other hyperlinked content, add annotations and branding with text and images, apply styles and color themes, and more.
The video below provides an overview of Looker Studio:
If your site runs on WordPress, there are a range of plugins you can use to track all kinds of performance metrics, such as social shares, opt-ins, lead conversions, sales, etc.
For example, with a free plugin like Hustle installed on your site, you can track your blog post’s social shares…
Use Hustle’s social sharing floating bar to track your content’s social media shares.
And view reports that help you track the success of your social sharing or lead generation campaigns…
Check your campaign performance stats inside WordPress with Hustle’s integrated dashboard.
For more plugins that can help you track content performance in WordPress, see this section: WordPress Engagement Plugins
Server Logs
Server logs can help to improve content performance in areas like technical SEO.
Server-file logs contain accurate information about every server request made for any file on your site (e.g. images, pages, etc.) and additional data that can help you improve your content performance using technical SEO.
For more sophisticated content performance tracking solutions, check out the tools below:
Databox
Databox Metric-Tracking Software.
Databox lets you connect data from over 70+ tools and track it from any device using customizable dashboards.
You can set up dashboards for different purposes that let you pull the metrics you want to track and visualize KPIs in various different ways, without requiring coding or design skills.
Databox provides 200+ free marketing dashboard examples and templates.
Databox also provides a query builder and a drag-and-drop formula builder so you can create custom metrics from popular integrations to get a more granular view of your company’s performance and calculate metrics from any data source.
With Databox, you can track company, team, and individual performance, gain insights into any activity and stay up-to-date on important metrics using goal tracking, KPI scorecards and alerts, annotations, automated reports, and more.
Klipfolio is a cloud-based web app that helps you grow your business by understanding, visualizing, and tracking useful and important KPIs and metrics.
Klipfolio lets you gather, share, display, and learn from your data in real time. You can also follow your data over time, enabling historical comparisons to track your progress, and make timely, effective business decisions.
If WordPress powers your CMS, you can find basic but useful information about your published content in the “At a Glance” section of your WordPress Dashboard.
The WordPress dashboard provides useful content publishing metrics about your CMS.
For example:
The number of posts/pages published on your blog or website.
The “At a Glance” panel is a default feature of WordPress that comes pre-installed with the software. However, you can enhance and expand this to add a wealth of other useful information about your content using many plugins.
WordPress lets you add a wealth of useful content tracking information about your site using plugins.
Learn more about various useful CMS plugins for WordPress here: WordPress CMS Plugins
Content Documentation Tracking
Regardless of what type of business you are in, you should be building a documentation library and keeping track of things like:
Document downloads – what documents are users downloading the most?
Document versions – are users downloading the latest/most up-to-date versions of your documents?
Document authors/managers – Who authored this content? Who is responsible for maintaining this document and keeping it updated?
Last time updated – When was this document last updated? Does the content need to be reviewed?
Additionally, there are specialized systems you can use to manage and track your organization’s content documentation, such as:
Document Management Systems – These help your organization transition from using paper documentation to storing and managing digital documents.
Digital Asset Management Software – Digital asset management (DAM) software stores, organizes, and distributes rich media files (e.g. images, files, video, audio, presentations, documents, etc.) in a central location. While many businesses invest in DAM software to manage their marketing content, it can be used to provide employees, clients, contractors, and other key stakeholders with controlled access to digital assets stored in a centralized digital library. A great place to research Digital Asset Management software is by reading software users’ reviews on G2.com
Workflow Documentation – Documenting workflows not only helps to define the roles, tasks, processes, and steps involved in the production of content, but it also helps to organize content ideas, prioritize projects, track their execution, determine what happens to the content after its published, and record how and where all the information gets stored.
Record Management – These systems are associated with governance, risk, and compliance and are often used in highly regulated industries like healthcare, where there is a need to control the creation, maintenance, and destruction of records.
Document Imaging – These systems scan, collect, organize, and manage digital images converted from paper documents.
Enterprise Content Management -These systems focus not only on content but also data, putting content in context by incorporating components of other types of document management systems, such as workflows, processes, business rules, etc.
Troubleshooting Content Tracking Issues
Measuring the performance of your content can be challenging, but there are several strategies that can help to overcome this difficulty, including:
Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): Identifying the right KPIs can help to ensure that the business is measuring the right metrics and that the metrics align with the business’s overall goals. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the goals of your business, such as website traffic, engagement rates, or conversions. Track these metrics regularly to measure the effectiveness of your content.
Use analytics tools: Analytics tools can provide valuable insights into the performance of your content and can help to identify areas for improvement. Use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track key metrics such as website traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Use this data to understand how your content is performing and identify areas for improvement.
Conduct A/B testing: A/B testing can help to understand what type of content resonates best with your target audience. Conduct A/B testing on different types of content, such as headlines, images, and call-to-action buttons, to understand which elements drive the most engagement and conversions.
Gather feedback: Gathering feedback from your target audience can provide valuable insights into how your content is perceived and can help to identify areas for improvement. Use surveys, focus groups, or other methods to gather feedback from your target audience. Use this feedback to understand how your content is being received and identify areas for improvement.
Keep an eye on competitors: Understanding how your competition is doing can help to identify areas where the business can improve its content. Use tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or BuzzSumo to track the performance of your competition’s content. Use this information to understand what type of content is resonating with your target audience and identify areas where your business can improve its content.
By implementing these strategies, your business can create a comprehensive content performance measurement system that will help you understand the effectiveness of your content, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. This will help your business improve its content and achieve its content marketing goals.
Content Tracking – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content tracking:
What is content tracking?
Content tracking refers to the process of monitoring and analyzing the performance and engagement of digital content across various channels and platforms. It involves gathering data on how users interact with content to assess its effectiveness.
Why is content tracking important?
Content tracking is vital for understanding audience behavior, optimizing content strategy, and measuring the impact of content marketing efforts. It helps organizations make data-driven decisions to improve content quality and drive desired outcomes.
What are the benefits of content tracking?
Content tracking enables businesses to identify content that resonates with their audience, optimize marketing strategies, improve ROI, and enhance user experience. It also helps in identifying trends, refining targeting, and maximizing content effectiveness.
What are the key metrics used in content tracking?
Common metrics include page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, time on page, conversion rate, social shares, and click-through rate (CTR). These metrics provide insights into content performance, audience engagement, and conversion effectiveness.
How can I track content performance?
Content performance can be tracked using various analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and content management systems (CMS) with built-in tracking capabilities. These tools offer features to monitor user behavior, analyze data, and generate reports.
How does content tracking differ from site analytics?
While both involve collecting data on user interactions, content tracking focuses specifically on how users interact with and respond to content, whereas site analytics may include additional data like server performance, traffic sources, and more technical metrics.
How can I effectively implement content tracking?
To implement content tracking effectively, define clear objectives, choose relevant metrics aligned with business goals, select appropriate tracking tools, set up tracking codes or tags, regularly analyze data, and iterate strategies based on insights.
Can content tracking improve SEO performance?
Yes, by analyzing content performance data, you can identify which pieces of content are performing well in search engine rankings and user engagement, which can inform your content creation and optimization strategies for better SEO results.
What are some challenges in content tracking?
Challenges include data privacy regulations, accuracy of tracking methods, integration of data from multiple sources, and interpretation of complex analytics. Addressing these challenges requires adopting best practices, leveraging technology, and staying updated on industry trends.
What privacy considerations should be kept in mind with content tracking?
Businesses must comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR or CCPA, which involve obtaining user consent before tracking their data, ensuring data is securely stored, and providing users the option to opt-out of tracking.
What is content tracking in the context of a CMS?
Content tracking refers to the monitoring and recording of user interactions with content within a Content Management System (CMS). This can include page views, link clicks, form submissions, and other interactions to understand content effectiveness and user engagement.
Why is content tracking important for businesses using CMS?
Content tracking helps businesses measure the performance of their content, understand audience preferences, optimize marketing strategies, and improve user experience by delivering more relevant content.
How can I set up content tracking in my CMS?
Most CMS platforms offer built-in tools or integrations with analytics services like Google Analytics. To set up content tracking, you typically need to configure these tools within your CMS settings and add any necessary tracking codes to your content pages.
What are some common metrics tracked in content management systems?
Common metrics include page views, unique visitors, time on page, bounce rates, conversion rates, and social shares. These metrics provide insights into how effectively content is attracting and retaining users.
Summary
Managing your content effectively requires being able to track and measure your content’s performance across all areas of your business.
This lesson has looked at various methods, tools, and strategies you can implement to track, measure, and improve content performance in your organization.
Action Steps
Review all areas of your business where content is used to help the business grow
Assess how effectively this content is being tracked and if what is being tracked is contributing to meeting the content metrics set out in your content strategy.
Research and implement tools and methods to improve your content tracking in areas like content production, content promotions, content management, etc.
Useful content management tips & tricks to help you get things done faster.
Content Management Tips & Tricks
Here are some useful content management tips & tricks to help you get things done faster.
Sometimes a content manager has to fix up things “on the fly” to get the content published and approved.
When this happens, it pays to have a few tips, tricks, and hacks up your sleeve.
This section contains a number of useful quick fixes that are worth knowing for when such occasions arise.
Note: One of the great benefits of working with content on the web is that you can publish something to meet a deadline and then go back and edit or fix things up after publishing. (e.g. replace banners and images, fix up typos, add or delete text, etc.)
In this lesson, we’ll cover a number of tips and tricks we’ve picked up over the years to help you get things done quicker when things need to be done quickly.
Let’s say that you are writing an article or a tutorial about upcoming changes that will be made to content on your website. These changes haven’t been implemented yet but your business wants you to publish the article or tutorial as soon as the changes to the website are made.
Here is a really useful tip for whenever these situations arise.
Let’s say that some of the content in the screenshot below needs to be changed on your website for your article or tutorial.
How can you change the content on your website to create new screenshots that reflect this “updated” content without changing the actual content of the website?
Let’s make some changes to this content without actually making any changes to the website. Source: KFC
Simple! Here’s how … if you are using the Chrome web browser, right-click on the content that needs changing and select “Inspect” from the menu…
Right-click and select “Inspect”
This will bring up the Web Developer’s Tools section and display a bunch of code on your screen.
Ignore all the code and locate the string of text that needs to be changed. You may have to dig a little and open up some nested sections in the code to find the text.
This is the string of text we want to change.
Once you find the string of text that needs changing, double-click on the text to select it, make the changes to the text, and hit the Enter button.
Change the text on your web browser
Close the Web Developer Tools section (click on the ‘X’). Your web browser should display the edited text in the same styling and format of the website. You can now take screenshots of the “new” content…
Your website now displays the “new” changes on your web browser.
Note: Don’t worry…nothing has actually changed on the actual website – you’re only playing with text on your own web browser.
This tip is really useful for taking screenshots of things like upcoming changes to pricing, product names, etc.
This tip is useful for creating a mock-up of web content displaying pricing changes.
Use this tip to change any text on your website…
You can change every text element on your website…this is a great tip for screenshots!
To view the original content on your website, just refresh your web browser. Everything will be restored to normal!
Working With Images
Having basic image editing skills can help you save time and money when making small fixes to content-like images.
Note: The following examples use Photoshop (other image editing applications should have similar features). You don’t need to be an advanced user to perform the tasks shown below, but having some basic Photoshop skills is useful.
Fixing Screenshots With Misspelled Words
Let’s apply the “Changing Web Browser Text” tip shown above to fix misspelled words on screenshots.
Suppose that you take a screenshot of an element on a web page for an article, tutorial, etc., and you discover there is a misspelling on the screenshot image, as shown in the example below…
The word “vulnerabilities” has been misspelled on this screenshot image.
The misspelled word is part of the screenshot image and the screenshot was taken from a web page.
The obvious solution would be to log into the website, edit the page, fix the spelling error, republish the page, then take a new screenshot of the web page with the word spelled correctly. But…what if it’s not your website?
Here’s one way to fix the screenshot…
First, go back to the web page that is the source of your screenshot and see if you can find the same word spelled correctly. Note: the correctly-spelled word needs to have the same typeface, heading size, color, etc. for this screenshot fix to work (it’s like finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack”).
You could get lucky and find an identical version of the misspelled word spelled correctly.
Take a screenshot of the correctly-spelled word (crop the image to make sure there is no extra spacing around the word), then superimpose the image with the word spelled correctly over the original screenshot in your image editing application.
Nudge the image into its correct position until the screenshot looks right, then save your image.
This method of fixing misspelled words in screenshots can be a little fidgety.
Tip: Use the layer opacity tool to make sure the superimposed image is aligned correctly with the screenshot below it (i.e. make the top layer slightly transparent so you can see the layer below as you nudge the image into position).
Make the top layer slightly transparent using the layer opacity tool.
Now that you know the manual way to fix misspelled words on screenshot images, let’s use the “browser editing” method, which is so much faster and easier if you are using the Chrome browser.
Go back to the web page and right-click on the misspelled word, then select “Inspect” from the menu…
Right-click and select “Inspect”
This should bring up the Web Developer’s Tools section with the line containing the misspelled word.
This is the string of text we want to change.
Click on the line, fix the spelling of the word, then hit “enter” or click outside that section to make the change…
Fix the spelling mistake in the line and hit “Enter”
The misspelled word should now be “magically” fixed on the web page, so you can take a new screenshot of the page with the correctly spelled word.
The web page content now displays correctly for your screenshot.
Adding A Callout To Images
Adding a callout to an image is useful when you want to bring attention to a particular feature or section of an image, create step-by-step screenshot tutorials, etc.
Add a callout to an image to make a feature or section stand out.
Adding callouts to images typically involve adding layered text, images, and shapes (e.g. ovals, rectangles) over the section of the image you want to make stand out.
In this example, we’ll add a red oval callout shape to the image below.
Next, create a new layer (so you’re not adding pixels directly to the screenshot image). This way, if you make a mistake, you can just delete the layer and start again.
Add a new layer when overlaying elements on your image.
Next, select a marquee tool (elliptical or rectangular) from the tools menu. In this example, we want to add an oval-shaped callout, so we’ll select the elliptical marquee and a border to it.
Draw the shape over the section of the image you want to make stand out.
Add an elliptical marquee over the image.
Next, select Edit> Stroke from the main menu.
Select Stroke to add a border to your elliptical marquee.
Enter the Stroke width (e.g. 1 px, 2 px, 4 px, etc.) and color (e.g. red), and a location (inside, center, outside), and click the OK button.
Select the width, color, and location of your border in the Stroke Options window.
Finally, click on the image to deselect the marquee.
Congratulations! You have added a callout to the image. Since you have added this element to your image on a separate layer, you can use the Move Tool to adjust the position of the callout. Also, feel free to add text overlays and arrows if required.
Here’s the process from start to finish:
Video: Adding callouts to images.
Highlighting Text In Images
If you know how to add callouts to images, then you will find that highlighting text (or sections of an image) is just as quick and easy.
Highlight words or sections of an image to draw the user’s attention.
To highlight a section of an image, add the image to your image editing application.
In this example, we want to emulate a highlighter pen, so select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools section and draw a rectangle over the text you want to be highlighted.
Add a marquee over the section you want to highlight.
Make sure that you are working on a new layer when you do this (in case you make a mistake). Next, in the main menu, select Edit > Fill…
Add a new layer, then select Edit > Fill.
You can highlight your image using any color you like. For this example, let’s use a bright yellow color to make the highlight stand out.
Select Color from the Fill > Contents dropdown menu.
Select Color from the Fill > Contents menu.
In the color picker, select the color for your highlight using any of the color palette tools, then click on the OK button.
Pick a fill color from the color picker.
As we are adding a color using the Fill tool, this should completely fill the rectangular marquee. As long as you have added the marquee and fill on a new layer, everything should be fine…there’s nothing to worry about!
This will fill the rectangular marquee with your selected color.
In the Layers tab, look for the Blending Modes dropdown menu (it will probably display the Normal mode) and select Multiply.
This multiplies the luminosity of the base color by the blend color, allowing the image below to show through the color-filled marquee. You can also adjust the intensity of the highlight color by reducing its opacity (increasing transparency).
Selecting the Multiply blending mode will fix this and make the rectangular marquee transparent allowing the text on the image to show through.
Click anywhere on the image to deselect the marquee. Congratulations! You should now see the section of text on your image highlighted.
Your image now has highlighted text.
Repeat this process to highlight other sections of your image. As we have added this element to a new layer, you should be able to easily adjust the highlight by moving it around on the image. You can also erase or trim any excess color sections to suit your taste.
Go nuts adding highlighted sections to your images!
Here’s the process from start to finish:
Video: Adding highlights to images.
Adding A Logo With White Background To Images
This is a quick hack that can help you if you need to overlay an image with a white background (e.g. a logo or watermark) on another image (e.g. a photo or stock image).
As you can see from the example image below, placing the logo with a white background over the stock image doesn’t look good.
This is not a good look!
Here’s a quick fix: Make sure to select the layer with the white background image and go to the Blending Modes dropdown menu (it will probably display the Normal mode).
Let’s change the blending mode of the layer containing the logo with the white background…
Select Multiply.
Select Multiply from the Blending Modes dropdown menu.
This multiplies the luminosity of the white color pixels by the blend color, creating the illusory effect of “transparency”.
When the Multiply blending mode is applied, the white background of the logo disappears.
Note: Sometimes you can get a better result by selecting Color Burn instead of Multiply from the Blending Modes dropdown menu, as shown in the image below.
In this case, applying the Color Burn blending mode also removes the white background and gives the logo image a more “rustic” look.
Here’s the process from start to finish:
Video: Adding overlays with white backgrounds to images.
Grabbing Text From Images
You can easily copy text from most web pages by simply highlighting the text on the page and copying it to your clipboard. There’s no trick to that.
Using a tool like Snagit, however, also lets you quickly and easily copy text embedded in images.
For example, to grab the text from an infographic image like the one shown below, simply launch Snagit, select the “Grab Text” option, and click on the “Capture” button.
Let’s copy the text in this infographic to our clipboard using Snagit.
Select the section of the image containing the text and Snagit intelligently analyzes and grabs the text contained in the selected section of that image.
Snagit has grabbed all the text in the area of the image we selected.
Now, simply copy and paste the results into your text editor.
Here is the image content pasted in from Snagit’s Grab Text feature.
Learn how to effectively manage, track, and improve your content marketing methods and results.
Content Promotion
Learn how to effectively manage, track, and improve your content marketing methods and results.
Content promotion is the process of distributing content through different channels to reach its intended audience.
The aim of creating content to grow your business is to get it in front of as many people in your target audience group as possible.
The more people in your target audience your content can reach, the greater its impact on the growth of your business will be.
It is beyond the scope and purpose of this course to cover areas of content marketing and promotion in-depth. There are many excellent sites and resources that provide exhaustive information on these topics and we list a number of these in this module’s “Resources” and “References” sections.
The focus of this module is to help you understand the role of content management in areas like content marketing and SEO.
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.
The Role Of Content Management In Content Promotion
When we think of content promotion, we mostly think of using different strategies and methods to distribute and promote different content types across different distribution channels.
For example, we might think of using paid and organic channels to promote blog posts, videos, or downloadable guides.
Many organizations, however, develop their content promotion strategy to include a multi-channel marketing approach and build their brand across many different platforms using many different tactics.
This means that the content used in your promotion methods has to be tailored and customized to the various different platforms used in your promotional campaigns.
For example, let’s say you are asked to create a piece of content to promote your business on social media. That same piece of visual content will need to be reworked and resized to comply with the image dimensions of different social platforms. This means not only making the content horizontal for Facebook and Twitter, square for Instagram, vertical for stories, etc. but also modifying captions or the accompanying copy to fit the platform’s requirements and be as effective as possible.
Additionally, as part of the promotional strategy, the same content may need to be repurposed for use across different platforms. For example, using the same piece of content formatted differently for social media, blog posts, and email newsletters.
All this content needs to be documented and stored for easy access and retrieval by the marketing team.
A good way to think of the role the content team plays in the area of content promotion, then, is that you can help your organization’s sales and marketing team become superheroes by being their most trusted and reliable sidekick.
How To Effectively Manage Content Used In Content Promotion
As a content manager or a member of a content team, it’s important to understand your organization’s marketing strategy and how to manage the content used in areas like sales and marketing activities.
For example, when looking at your company’s marketing mix, renowned sales trainer Brian Tracy defines 7 ‘P’s for sales and marketing success. Each of these areas involves using content, which needs management:
Product – While the marketing team is responsible for determining what the company’s products and services are, what they stand for, what differentiates them from the competition, whether they meet market demands and customer needs, and come up with appropriate messaging that communicates this, the content team also plays a role in this area. For example, by helping to manage and produce content (e.g. content designed to get feedback from users to create new products or services or improve existing ones).
Pricing – Your company may need to seasonally increase or decrease the pricing of its products or services to remain competitive and engage in sales and promotional activities. It’s important to make sure that wherever there is published content displaying pricing information, it can be quickly and easily updated to reflect accurate pricing changes.
Promotion – This area includes all the ways the business tells its customers about products and services. The content team can help deliver the business better results in this area by reviewing and suggesting improvements to promotional copy (e.g. headlines, calls to action, etc.) and reviewing content metrics.
Place – This is where your products and services are actually sold. It’s where the customer meets the salesperson. Since much of this activity now takes place online (e.g. eCommerce), digital content plays a vital role in all sales and marketing communications.
Packaging – It’s important to look at every element of content in your company’s products and services packaging with a critical eye just as a prospective customer would. Are there any improvements to the text or visual elements of the packaging that could be made to create a better impression on customers?
Position – This is about winning the hearts and minds of your customers. What are the specific words that people use to describe your company’s products and services to others? Can you create more content around this to improve the way people think and talk about your company and its positioning in your market?
People – Ultimately, everything is done by people. Having the right people in the right roles creates better results for the business. Content plays an important role in selecting, recruiting, hiring, and retaining people. For example, HR content such as documents outlining roles and responsibilities, policies, company guidelines, training, staff manuals, etc.
All aspects of marketing related to content promotion need content management.
If we return to the basic premise of this course (i.e. “all content needs management”), then it’s clear that content promotion also needs content management.
Earlier, we talked about the role of the content team in content promotion as being like a superhero’s trusted and reliable sidekick, handling the tools in their ‘utility belts’ when help is needed, and providing the business with the support and information it needs to run its marketing activities smoothly and deliver consistent results.
The lessons in this module look at what this means from a practical perspective.
Content Metrics
Content metrics help you track how well your content is performing and measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
Although Google won’t disclose the ranking signals they use to drive content higher in their search results, they do allow you to understand their mindset by sharing extensive documentation with clear guidelines on how to create quality content that will help to improve your rankings and the questions they ask when writing algorithms to assess site quality.
Promoting your content to the right audiences using the right content types via the right channels helps you get the content you create in front of the audience you create it for.
Now that you understand the content promotion process better, it’s time to create your content promotion plan.
Your content promotion plan is a document that outlines the strategy and tactics for promoting and distributing the content created by your business.
It typically includes the goals and objectives for your content promotion, your target audience, the distribution channels to be used, the timing and scheduling of promotions, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your content promotion activities.
Your business needs a content promotion plan because it helps you to effectively reach and engage your target audience and to maximize the impact of the content you produce.
By having a plan in place, your business can also more efficiently allocate resources and budget toward content promotion and track the performance of your promotion efforts over time.
Additionally, a content promotion plan can help your business to identify and leverage the most effective distribution channels for reaching your target audience and to stay consistent and on-brand with your messaging.
Furthermore, having a specific plan for the promotion of your content, allows you to maximize your reach, it will ensure that your content is seen by the right people at the right time, rather than just publishing it and hoping it will be found. It will also allow you to track the effectiveness of your promotion and make adjustments as needed.
In short, your content promotion plan is your strategy for getting the word out about your business’s content. It helps your business increase the visibility of your content and drive engagement and conversions.
Content Promotion Plan Goals And Objectives
Common content promotion plan goals and objectives include:
Reach and engagement: The goal is to increase the visibility and reach of your content to a wider audience through various promotion channels. This can be achieved by sharing content on social media, sending newsletters, and creating and sharing infographics on social media platforms.
Brand awareness: The goal is to increase your brand awareness and visibility by promoting your content so it aligns with your brand’s messaging and values. This can be achieved by creating and sharing branded graphics, videos, and infographics, and guest blogging on relevant websites,
Search engine optimization (SEO): The goal is to improve the visibility and ranking of your content in search engines through strategic keyword usage, meta-tag optimization, and backlinks. This can be achieved by researching and including relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, and creating internal and external links.
Lead generation: The goal is to generate leads and collect contact information from interested users by promoting content that includes calls to action. This can be achieved by creating and promoting e-books, webinars, and other content that requires contact information for access.
Influencer marketing: The goal is to increase the reach and credibility of your content by partnering with influencers in the industry. This can be achieved by working with influencers in your niche to create and promote content and collaborating with influencers to create sponsored posts.
Email marketing: The goal is to promote your content and increase engagement through email campaigns. This can be achieved by sending a newsletter that includes links to recent blog posts or promoting a new product or service through email. (Also, consider using video marketing)
Paid promotion: The goal is to increase the visibility and reach of content by paying for advertising on various platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Twitter Ads. This can be achieved by promoting a blog post on Facebook and running a Google Ads campaign to promote an e-book.
How To Create A Content Promotion Plan
Here are the steps you can follow to create a content promotion plan for your business:
Review your content: Before promoting your content, make sure it is of high quality and relevant to your target audience.
Identify your target audience: Determine who your target audience is and where they can be found. This will help you decide which channels to use for promotion.
Select your promotion channels: Decide on the channels you will use to promote your content. This might include social media, email marketing, video marketing, paid advertising, influencer marketing, etc.
Create a promotion calendar: Use a calendar or scheduling tool to plan out when and how you will promote each published piece of content.
Create promotional content: Create promotional content like social media posts, email subject lines, ad copy, etc. to share with your audience to drive engagement and increase visibility.
Use metrics to measure your results: Set up metrics to track the success of your content promotions. Use this data to optimize your promotions over time.
Evaluate and adjust your plan: Review your results and make adjustments as needed to improve your content promotion plan.
Example Of A Content Promotion Plan
Here is an example of what a simple content promotion plan to promote a B2B company’s webinar might look like:
Audience: Business owners and managers in the manufacturing industry
Goals: Increase brand awareness, generate leads, increase attendance to the webinar
Competitors: Industry leaders and peers
Topics:
The latest technology for the manufacturing industry
How to increase productivity and reduce costs
Plan:
Promote the webinar on social media: 1 week before the webinar
Email the audience: 3 days before the webinar
Reach out to influencers in the industry: 2 weeks before the webinar
Run Facebook and LinkedIn ads: 1 week before the webinar
Distribution:
Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook
Email marketing: Weekly newsletter
Paid Advertising: LinkedIn Ads, Facebook ads
Influencer marketing: Reach out to industry leaders
Promotion calendar:
Social media posts: Start promoting 1 week before the webinar
Email the audience: 3 days before the webinar
Reach out to influencers: 2 weeks before the webinar
Run Facebook and LinkedIn ads: 1 week before the webinar
By following these steps and regularly monitoring your results, you’ll be able to create a content promotion plan that helps you reach your target audience and achieve your business goals with your webinar or any other content.
Content Promotion Challenges
Promoting your content can be a challenging task, as it requires a combination of technical skills, marketing strategies, and audience engagement.
While content promotion is a crucial and necessary part of your content strategy, it can also present the following challenges:
No clear strategy: Without a clear and well-defined content promotion strategy, it can be difficult to effectively promote a website’s content and achieve desired results.
Audience engagement: creating content that resonates with the target audience and encourages them to share and engage with it.
Competition: There is a lot of competition for attention, visibility, and engagement on the internet, and it can be difficult to stand out among other websites and content creators.
Lack of traffic: Without a significant number of visitors to a website, it can be difficult to gain traction and promote content effectively.
Limited budget: Promoting content can be expensive, and websites with limited budgets may not have the resources to effectively promote their content.
Limited reach: Even with a large amount of traffic, a website’s reach may be limited if the majority of visitors are not within the target audience.
Producing high-quality content: The quality of your content is very important. Poor-quality content will be hard to promote and get noticed by the audience. Ensuring that your content is informative and of high quality is important for keeping your audience engaged.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – making sure the website and its content are optimized to rank well in search engine results pages.
Algorithm changes: Search engines and social media platforms frequently update their algorithms, which can greatly impact the visibility and reach of a website’s content.
Content promotion activities: Actively promoting the content through various channels such as social media, email marketing, and advertising.
Measuring and analyzing performance: Tracking content metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates to measure the success of content promotion efforts.
Content Promotion Checklist
Define promotion goals: Clearly define the goals for promoting the content, such as increasing website traffic or generating leads.
Identify target audience: Identify the target audience for your content and where they are most likely to be found online.
Create a distribution plan: Develop a plan for distributing the content through various channels, such as social media, email, and paid advertising.
Optimize for SEO: Optimize the content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
Use social media: Share the content on your company’s social media platforms and encourage your followers to share it with their own networks.
Reach out to influencers: Reach out to influencers in your industry and ask them to share the content with their audience.
Leverage email marketing: Include your content in your email newsletter and send it to your email subscribers.
Leverage video marketing: Include your content in videos and upload these to popular video-sharing platforms.
Use paid promotion: Consider using paid promotion, such as Google Ads or Facebook ads, to reach a larger audience.
Track and analyze: Use analytics tools to track the performance of your promotions and gather insights for future campaigns.
Repurpose and refresh: Repurpose the content and refresh it with new information and insights to reach new audiences and keep existing audiences engaged.
Continuously monitor and improve: Continuously monitor and improve your promotion strategy based on the results and feedback.
Content Promotion – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content promotion:
What is content promotion?
Content promotion involves strategies and tactics used to distribute content to reach a broader audience. This may include sharing it through social media, email marketing, paid ads, or collaborating with influencers.
Why is content promotion important?
Content promotion is vital to increase visibility of your content, attract more traffic, engage audiences, and ultimately drive conversions. It helps to ensure that your valuable content reaches its intended audience and doesn’t just sit unnoticed.
How do I choose the right platforms for promoting my content?
Select platforms based on where your target audience spends their time. Analyze demographic data and platform popularity among your audience. Tailor your approach to fit the platform’s unique environment and user behavior.
What are some effective content promotion strategies?
How can I measure the success of my content promotion efforts?
Use analytics tools to track metrics such as page views, user engagement, social shares, and conversion rates. This data will help you understand the effectiveness of your strategies and guide future efforts.
What role do SEO and keywords play in content promotion?
SEO and keywords help to optimize your content so it is more likely to appear in search results, increasing organic visibility and traffic. Keyword optimization should be strategically aligned with the content topics and the search habits of your target audience.
Can I repurpose my content for promotion?
Yes, repurposing content across different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video or an infographic) can maximize its reach and appeal to different audience preferences, making it a versatile tool in content promotion.
How often should I promote my content?
The frequency of content promotion should depend on the platform and the nature of your content. Regular updates and reminders can keep your audience engaged without overwhelming them. Balance is the key to maintaining interest and relevance.
Summary
Content promotion activities such as content marketing and SEO including the promotion channels used to distribute this content all require content management.
Your content team plays a vital role in this area, helping to make the marketing team’s work more effective.
The process of content promotion involves getting your content in front of the right people, at the right time, and in the right format.
However, this can be challenging as there are various hurdles to overcome, such as increasing visibility, standing out in a crowded digital landscape, measuring performance, and budgeting.
Additionally, creating high-quality content that resonates with the target audience and encouraging engagement and sharing are also important aspects of effective content promotion.
Without a well-planned approach, promoting content can be a difficult and time-consuming task.
Action Steps
Review all areas relevant to content promotion in your organization and make sure that systems for managing, documenting, and accessing the content in these areas have been effectively implemented.
Resources
Content Promotion Kit – Includes a content promotion checklist (PDF), an editable checklist to customize for your business, templates for sharing content with leads, customers, and influencers, and templates for promoting content on social media.
Learn about using videos and video marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Video Marketing
Learn about using videos and video marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Research from leading online sources shows that people are watching more videos online than ever before.
According to sites like Wyzowl and Statista, for example, around 500 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and more than 1 billion videos get viewed each day on TikTok.
It’s no wonder, then, that videos are an important part of marketing a business online effectively.
In this lesson, we provide a brief overview of video marketing and the challenges of managing your video content as part of your video marketing strategy.
“Video marketing is using videos to promote and market your product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social channels, educate your consumers and customers, and reach your audience with a new medium.”
More businesses are turning to video marketing and investing in the creation and distribution of video content to promote and market their services online.
And there is a good reason for this. According to Wyzowl, customers overwhelmingly prefer watching short videos to learn more about a product or service and buy physical and digital goods than reading text-based articles or blog posts, viewing infographics, downloading ebooks or manuals, attending webinars, receiving sales calls or trialing demos.
Also, the same research shows that people watch on average 2.5 hours of online videos and are twice as likely to share video content than any other type of content, including social media posts, blog posts, articles, or product pages.
In short, videos can be a powerful and effective way to:
Increase traffic to your website
Increase dwell time (the amount of time a user takes analyzing a web page before clicking back to search results)
Increase a user’s understanding of your product or service
Generate new business leads
Increase sales
Reduce support calls
Increase brand awareness
Generate good ROI
To reap the above benefits, however, you need an effective video marketing strategy.
Your Video Marketing Strategy
Video marketing is an effective way to promote and market your business online, but there are also challenges.
Online consumers are inundated every day with all kinds of marketing, advertising, and sales messages, and exposed to other types of interesting, and engaging visual content like live streaming, interactive 360 videos, augmented reality, and more.
On top of this, many competing businesses are also using videos.
For your video marketing strategy to be effective, then, you may need to create different types of branded video content and distribute these through different channels to reach your target audience and achieve your goals, taking into account the fact that most online consumers have very limited time and short attention spans, that there may be a lot of competition, and that your business may have very limited resources, such as a small budget, and a content team that lacks the time and the video production and editing skills to create really polished videos.
It’s also important to think about the purpose of your videos and where you plan to display these.
For example, some of the places you may want to display your videos include:
Landing or email-capture pages
Sales pages
Social media platforms
Social media ads
Private membership sites (e.g. welcome page, training pages, etc.)
Crowdfunding sites
Affiliate sites
etc.
Factors like your strategic goals, the story you want to tell using a video format, your budget, etc. will determine the types of videos your can produce and how you will distribute these.
For more information on creating an effective video marketing strategy, we recommend reading these excellent guides:
Most widely used video distribution channels. Source: Wyzowl
Research shows that in addition to posting videos on YouTube, more businesses are now planning to include channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok in their video marketing strategy.
For the latest video marketing statistics, including the most widely-used video distribution channels, go here.
Types Of Videos
What are the different kinds of videos you can create and what types of videos should you create for your business?
This all depends on your video marketing strategy.
According to Wyzowl, here are the most popular types of videos being created
The main types of videos being created. Source: Wyzowl
As the graph above shows, most video types fall into these groups:
Live Action – Live action videos are quick to film and edit, and can be made quite inexpensively (see description in the next section below).
Animated – Animated videos let you control every aspect of what viewers will see (see description in the next section below).
Screen Recorded – Screen-recorded videos essentially capture what you can see on your entire screen or a section of your screen, and can include mouse movements, callouts, annotations, in-picture videos, background soundtracks, etc. in the editing process. These types of videos are great for “looking over the shoulder” how-to tutorials.
And here are the most popular types of videos being created according to their purpose…
These are the most popular types of videos. Source: Wyzowl
Let’s go through these different types of videos:
Animated Videos
As stated earlier, with animated videos, you have complete control over all aspects of what will appear in your video.
You control the video’s look and feel…from background scenery to main characters, design, text, callouts, colors, timings, transitions, soundtrack, special effects, and more.
Additionally, animated videos can be created completely in-house on your computer. You don’t have to hire actors, scout for shoot locations, or worry about bad takes and reshoots. You can tweak and refine animated videos to your heart’s content and go back and edit them at any time.
You can also use animated videos to create almost all other types of videos, including video ads, teaser videos, sales videos, explainer videos, product demos, event videos, training videos, onboarding videos, and more!
Here is an example of an animated video used to explain food safety cross-contamination…
For more information and examples of animated videos, go here:
App demo videos (also called app explainer videos) show off what a mobile app can do…how it works, how it looks, how it feels, and all the features and benefits users need to know and understand to download or buy and use your app.
App demo videos are often made using direct screen recordings but can include footage of the app, elements of animated or live-action video, 3D device animations, illustrations, and more!
Many app demos can also double up as explainer videos by introducing your target audience to the features and story behind your app.
Check out this animated app demo video for a children’s learning app:
For more information and examples of app demo videos, go here:
“Behind the scene” videos let viewers meet the people working in your company, see your team at work, and gain valuable insights into your business processes and your company culture.
“Behind the scene” videos are not only great for personalizing your business and building trust but they can also act as an effective recruitment tool for your company.
Here is a great example of a “behind the scenes” video:
For more information and examples of “behind-the-scenes” videos, go here:
A corporate or business video refers to the production of video content for brands and companies that can be used for everything – from educating and persuading new customers, to providing informative walkthroughs and demos of your website or solutions, to training and onboarding new employees.
Corporate videos can include a mix of different video types – animated, live-action, screen-recorded, interactive, and more.
They are also quite versatile, in that the final video can be used for a wide range of purposes (e.g. social posts, emails, adverts, trade shows, etc.).
Here is an example of a corporate video created by a University for viewers who are deciding on which higher-learning institute they should attend:
For more information and examples of corporate videos, go here:
Onboarding videos welcome, educate, and empower customers and users about the full benefits of your company, products, services, and features, help them get their accounts and administrative settings up and running, show them how to assemble and use physical/digital products, and give them the knowledge and tools they need to get up and running quickly.
Onboarding videos also help to improve user experience and increase customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and revenue by upskilling and empowering them and providing them with timely information and support, reducing product returns due to buyer’s remorse.
Onboarding videos range from simple welcome videos to software demo videos, product walkthrough videos, detailed educational videos, etc.,
They can also be used in a range of different ways. For example, you can make them available as an on-demand “learn at your own pace” type knowledge portal, upload them to YouTube and add them to a ‘User Onboarding’ playlist, build the video content into your customer workflow as an interactive guide, and more.
Here is an example of a “bite-sized” customer onboarding video from Asana:
For more information and examples of customer onboarding videos, go here:
Customer service videos help customers troubleshoot and solve problems, answer questions about your products or services, and reduce support queries.
Customer service videos can include FAQ videos, video tutorials, and feature or product demos.
Publishing customer service videos publicly can also help to build trust with users and reassure them that your business will be there to support them.
If you are wondering how to create customer service videos that will help get you and your customers out of a pickle, watch the video below:
For more information and examples of customer service videos, go here:
Demo videos are short, educational video clips that showcase your products or services, highlight their key benefits, and explain or show how your products or services work.
Demo videos typically encourage viewers to purchase the product or service after watching it in action and can be done in the form of a tutorial, a showcase, or an animated video.
Here, for example, is an animated demo video offering an innovative solution to a problem that many new parents have to face (some do it bravely, and some just suck it up):
For more information and examples of demo videos, go here:
Event videos are great for grabbing the attention of viewers and passersby at events like exhibitions and trade shows and providing them with product highlights or a visual summary of what your business does.
You can also use event videos to generate a buzz (and sell tickets) before an event, add impact to award ceremonies (e.g. to introduce nominees, review “best moments”, celebrate winners, etc.), enhance sales presentations or investment pitches, give audiences a “behind the scenes” tour at internal events like annual team meetings, sales conferences, sales kick-offs, etc.
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from event videos and produce these as animated event videos or live-action videos with event videography.
Here is an example of an event video aimed at participants with a lot of dough to throw around:
For more information and examples of event videos, go here:
Explainer videos are designed to save companies time and help viewers quickly understand their business, product, or service by communicating key concepts and key points concisely.
Explainer videos are one of the most popular and versatile types of videos. They can be any length, but many are typically 1-2 minutes long, and once created, can be used repeatedly in multiple ways, such as:
Your home page
Social media
Email signatures
Paid social/YouTube ad campaigns
Events
Introduction to training or onboarding new customers or new team members.
Additionally, you can use elements from your explainer video as web graphics (e.g. a screengrab) and other print/digital assets.
Here is a video that tells you nothing, yet explains everything about what this company does:
For more information and examples of explainer videos, go here:
Unlike “linear” videos where users can only play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward content, interactive videos put users in control of their viewing experience by allowing them to click and interact with your video content to make decisions, answer questions, complete forms, buy products, and more!
An interactive video is essentially video content overlaid with interactive elements so the choices viewers make while watching determine how the video plays out.
Some of the most popular interactive features & functionality of interactive videos include branching stories with clickable hotspots and outcomes that depend on the choices viewers make, navigating to specific chapters in the video content, interactive quizzes, and built-in eCommerce allowing users to fill out forms and buy products on your ‘shoppable video’.
It’s important to note that interactive videos need to be hosted on a special server for the overlaid interactive functionality of the video to work.
Click on the image below to view an interactive video that walks you through Amazon’s company onboarding process using a gamified approach.
Amazon’s interactive onboarding video.
For more information and examples of interactive videos, go here:
A live-action video is essentially recording people talking on camera. This can be the company CEO, members of a team, clients, customers, etc. telling a story in their own words, and sharing their expertise or experiences (e.g. testimonials).
Featuring real people in your video puts a face to your brand adds a personal touch, and helps to build trust and credibility
If you are looking to create a high volume of video content (e.g. for social media), live-action videos are ideal, as they are relatively quick to film and edit.
Here is one of the most successful live-action explainer videos of all time:
For more information and examples of interactive videos, go here:
Microinteractions are trigger-based events where a user interacts with your website or mobile app through animation.
No doubt you have seen microinteractions on websites and social media. Simple examples are the ‘heart’ or ‘thumbs up’ animation that comes up when you like someone’s post or text message, and the animated ‘loading’ icon you see when you are waiting for a web page to load.
Microinteractions are designed to provide users with instant and relevant feedback, add “emotion” and status updates, and encourage user interaction (e.g. sharing, liking, and commenting on your content). They can help to improve site navigation and user experience and make your website more interesting and engaging to users.
Product demo videos let you educate, explain, entertain, and sell products by building customer confidence and removing barriers to purchase.
Product demo videos work in a similar way to explainer videos by showing users product features, explaining their functionality, and involving them so they can understand what the product does, how it works, and visualize themselves using it.
You can include live-action footage (e.g. someone presenting and giving a product demonstration) and/or animation (e.g. cross-sections, close-ups, etc.) in your product demo videos.
In addition to helping you sell products directly to consumers, product demo videos can also be used to educate your sales team, distributors, affiliates, clients, etc.
Here, for example, is a slick video aimed at coffee-loving consumers who want to enjoy barista-style coffees at home:
For more information and examples of product demo videos, go here:
Sales videos support your sales process by helping to convert leads into new customers.
In addition to educating potential customers about the benefits and features of your products or services, they help to build rapport, address frequently asked questions, and proactively overcome objections, inspiring and persuading prospects to become customers.
Sales videos are also great for people that don’t like being “sold to” as these can work for you as your 24/7 sales team, delivering a perfect sales pitch consistently, and allowing prospects to inspect what you have to offer in a place where they feel safe, comfortable, and at a time that is suitable and convenient for them.
Sales videos can save your sales reps time (by helping them spend less time on the phone taking and making sales calls), used instead of an actual sales team member, or included in a sales presentation.
Sales videos can be created using a blend of animated or live-action footage, and include text slides, testimonials, product demos or showcases, screen recordings, interactive elements, and more…whatever is required to get someone interested in your brand to the point where they make a decision to buy.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with injecting a little humor in your sales videos, so you can sell without actually saying much about your company or products, as shown in the video below:
For more information and examples of sales videos, go here:
Social media videos are short-form videos designed to tell stories that will attract viewers on social platforms and drive engagement actions.
Various types of videos work well on social media, including interviews, Q&As, live videos, announcements, reveals, behind-the-scenes, product demos, user-generated videos, giveaways and contests, promos and deals, event videos, and tutorials.
With most social media platforms, you can simply upload your regular videos, like the example video shown below, sourced from Facebook:
In addition to posting videos on social platforms, you can use animated videos and animated social graphics in status updates, profiles, news feeds, and other areas to keep followers interested.
Note: You may need to adjust your video formats and filesto use some of the advertising and promotional features available on various social media platforms.
For more information and examples of social media videos, go here:
Just like movie trailers, teaser videos give viewers a sneak peek of a product or service and are designed to raise awareness and build anticipation about new and upcoming features, products, and events (live events, online courses, etc.).
You can create a teaser video if you haven’t yet finished building your new product, service, feature, or idea. This allows you to get your promotion going and build momentum and anticipation for it earlier, as well as providing an opportunity for feedback from your audience.
You can then gauge the feedback and response to refine your development process and improve the chances of success for your final product.
Alternatively, if you are creating a teaser video for a more complete and fuller video-based product (e.g. an online course), here is an effective format for creating ‘sneak-peek’ videos:
Script and produce the full (i.e. complete) version of your video first
Identify an ideal spot in your video timeline to insert a break
Create an additional ‘click here to learn more’ slide
Produce two versions of the video: your full video and the shorter teaser video ending with the ‘click here to learn more’ slide.
You can also create the above sneak peek video by editing highlights of your course and compiling these into a “compilation teaser” video.
Once you have your teaser video done, make sure to share it on your website and social media platforms…maybe even consider boosting it with an ad spend or going offline (e.g. video billboards, events, TV, etc.) to generate maximum impact and awareness.
Below is a video compilation showcasing various product teaser videos:
For more information and examples of teaser videos, go here:
Allowing your satisfied customers and clients to promote and champion your business through testimonial videos (and case study videos) is a powerful way to build trust, boost credibility, and provide social proof for your brand, and ultimately increase sales of your products and services.
Just as many consumers check product reviews from other users before making a decision, many people also watch video testimonials to learn more about a company, product, or service and to help influence their purchasing decisions.
Testimonial videos are especially effective when your business can demonstrate through customers or client testimonials how your solution, product, or service has helped solve their problems and address their pain points, as many of your target audience will experience similar issues and challenges.
There are various ways to create testimonial videos. You can:
Create low-budget testimonial videos in-house by collecting written testimonials from satisfied customers, adding these to a slide presentation with a voice-over and/or soundtrack, and presenting these as a screen recording
Use video testimonial software (see further below), or
Create live-action recordings using a professional video production company.
You can add testimonial videos to product/service pages on your website, share them on social media, include them in video ad campaigns, and various other ways.
Here is an example of a low-budget yet compelling video testimonial you could shoot with just your phone and basic video-editing software:
For more information and examples of testimonial videos, go here:
Training videos are a powerful learning tool, especially “look over the shoulder”-style how-to screen recordings and videos that combine audio and visual elements with written text such as bullet point reminders, key concept summaries, checklists, diagrams, flowcharts, etc.
One of the main benefits of creating training videos from a business point of view is that these provide consistency in your organization. Videos can be used to train individuals or whole teams and explain your processes, policies, products, production workflows, and troubleshooting, as well as the culture, values, behaviors, and standards your organization expects from all team members.
They are also extremely cost-effective, as you can use the same video to train new team members or new customers or clients.
From the viewer’s point of view, there are many benefits too. Viewers can learn at their own pace and usually at a time that suits them, rewind over points repeatedly, and demonstrate in a couple of minutes what could take hours to explain.
Training videos encompass a wide range of purposes and can use different styles (e.g. screen recording, animation. live-action, or a combination of all of these) to communicate their information.
For example, you can create the following types of training videos:
Product training videos to demonstrate how products work.
Demo videos to provide an overview of how a software application or product works.
Orientation videos to welcome new members to your team and help them learn about their new roles.
Customer relations videos to showcase customer interactions and improve customer experience using ‘roleplay’ scenarios.
Sales training videos to empower your sales team to present effectively, handle objections, and convert prospects into new sales.
Retail training videos to show your team how customers should be treated and help them learn skills like upselling and cross-selling, dealing with difficult customers and complaints, etc.
Safety training videos to demonstrate how to operate safely and follow correct procedures.
HR training videos to explain your policies and make your rules and expectations clear.
Explainer videos to help your team members, customers, distributors, reps, affiliates, etc. understand your business, products, services, solutions, etc.
Training videos can also be of varying lengths. In some cases, long videos may be required, such as recorded presentations or webinars. In other situations, it may be more effective if the information is broken down into bite-size digestible short videos.
For example, here is a comprehensive video tutorial on using Photoshop that delivers almost one hour of training content…
And here is an example of a short instructional video dealing with workplace bullying:
For more information and examples of training videos, go here:
Video advertising is using video content to sell products or services.
Video ads are typically promotional-type videos introducing your brand, product, or service, which are created specifically for sharing outside of your business, where you pay for audiences to view or click on it.
Video ads can be quite effective if done right. The key is to capture the viewer’s attention within the first few seconds, and then keep them engaged with content that tells the right story without ‘hard selling’ them, and then asking for the purchase at the right moment.
Typical examples of video ads include:
Video banner advertisements appearing on a landing page or website.
Pre-, mid-, or post-roll video advertisements that are played before, during, or after an online video or a video posted on social media.
TV video ads aired as traditional commercials on TV or streaming services.
Live video ads shown as part of a real-time streamed event, conversation, or product launch.
Sponsored video ads (e.g. “This video is brought to you by…”) placed within other videos or marketing content.
Below is an example of a video ad aimed at mobile phone users and created to promote Android:
For more information and examples of video ads, go here:
“Videographics are an engaging visual representation of compiled data put forward in a graphically appealing and easy-to-understand way…
A videographic provides the audience with valuable information while entertaining them at the same time. It is a short, informative type of video that helps your audience digest your reports or statistical numbers better in a matter of minutes. “
Essentially, a videographic makes information easier to interpret by taking complex data and data-driven messages from statistics, polls, and survey results and turning them into compelling and concise visual information made simple, quick, and easy to consume.
Informative videographics encourage sharing on multiple platforms, resulting in better brand recall.
Below is an example of a videographic-based video:
For more information and examples of videographics, go here:
Here are some useful tools tat can help to improve your video marketing results.
Hookle
Hookle – Social Media Planning App
Hookle is an app that lets you manage all of your social media marketing in one place and lets you schedule and publish your videos to all your social media platforms.
Check out the video below for an overview of this tool:
For more social media management tools that you can use to track video performance across multiple platforms, see this section of the course: Social Media Tools
Create Cartoon Explainer Videos Easily
Cartoon explainer videos can be very effective when it comes to grabbing and keeping a viewer’s attention.
They can also be used to inform, educate, and convert viewers into prospective clients and customers, train users, simplify complex subjects, tell engaging stories, etc.
As stated earlier, explainer videos are great for getting your point across quickly, reducing customer support calls, and getting your videos shared online.
Cartoon explainer videos can also be expensive to create. A digital agency will typically charge thousands of dollars to create a short animated video for your business, and some will even charge thousands of dollars per minute of video!
For an inexpensive and easy-to-use cartoon explainer video creation software that you can use to create animated explainer videos in-house, check out Toonly.
Animated Video Creation Tool
If you are looking for a powerful video creation software tool that can help you create 2D & 3D animated marketing, explainer, and training videos, doodle sketch videos, and motion videos in-house in minutes, check out Doodly.
Live Action Video Animation
If you are looking for a video animation tool that lets you easily create stunning live-action video intros and logo stings with no video editing or production skills, check out Viddyoze.
Use any of the tools below to collect video testimonials from happy clients and customers and promote these on your website, blog, social media, etc.
Vocal Video
Vocal Video – All-in-one video testimonial software platform.
Vocal Video is an all-in-one platform for collecting, editing, hosting, and sharing testimonial videos.
This tool lets you easily and quickly collect testimonial videos, edit them, and apply your branding.
You can also trim your video, add graphics and licensed music, switch from video to audio, and create a video transcript directly from the tool with no additional software required.
VideoAsk is a “video conversation” platform that lets you and your customers quickly send video, text, or audio replies back and forth.
Essentially, it’s like communicating via emails but using videos instead.
You can use this tool to collect customer feedback, add video welcome messages for respondents, and use conditional logic to send pre-recorded questions to customers based on their previous responses.
VideoPeel allows users to click, record, and submit video testimonials automatically via mobile or desktop using a video capture link. The tool also automates thank-you messages.
VideoPeel displays all of your questions on one screen and offers you the option of choosing different video campaign templates (profile message, photo message, or video message). You can use their editing tools to add your logo, a simple text overlay, a star rating, and a disclaimer.
Collected video responses are held in a single repository for easy management.
VideoPeel also offers Shopify integration, Amazon syndication, and other eCommerce and social media publishing options.
Vouch is a video testimonials tool that lets you add questions and send a single link to one or many users.
You can review your video responses and transcripts, trim your videos or stitch them together to create a playlist using their video editing software, and publish or share these via a link, embed code, or integration.
The tool features speaker notes, calendar reminders, and unlimited takes, allowing users to easily record their video responses and send these back to you.
Vouch lets you add your own logo, colors, and styling to control your brand experience across all touchpoints, and integrates with many popular workflow tools, allowing you to collect and share video testimonials from tools you are already using.
Video monetization platforms allow you to get paid for the videos you publish online. When audiences view or download your content, you get paid, so the more that people watch, the more you earn.
If you would like to monetize your videos, consider using a tool like the one shown below.
Uscreen
Uscreen is an end-to-end white-labeled video monetization platform that supports subscription and pay-per-view models and is designed to generate revenue on OTT streaming services similar to Netflix or Hulu.
Uscreen provides everything you need to monetize, distribute and scale your streaming service business: video hosting, streaming, built-in billing, monetization, analytics, and even end-user support.
Uscreen also provides membership sites for your subscribers, fully-branded apps for mobile and TV, tools to host live streaming events, community and course features, and more than 1,000 integrations (e.g. Mailchimp, Salesforce, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and many more!)
Video marketing is not only essential when it comes to promoting your content online effectively, it is also extremely challenging to track and manage effectively without the right strategy, systems, processes, tools, resources, and budget.
Before you start producing videos for your business, make sure that you have the following in place:
Your Content Strategy and Content Plan to ensure that any videos you create will contribute to achieving your business objectives.
A documented content production workflow – whether you decide to create videos in-house or outsource the creation to an external agency, it’s important for your video creation processes to be documented.
Content Documentation System – where are you storing all digital assets, files, and elements used in the production of your videos? Make sure these are easily accessible as you will need to update your videos in the future.
Video Metrics – Have you defined the important metrics you will be tracking for your videos? You will need these metrics to know which videos and video topics are generating the best ROI and to improve your results.
Tracking System – Your tracking system will help you monitor, measure, and evaluate the effectiveness of your videos and your video marketing campaigns.
Summary
Most businesses with an online presence today need to engage in video marketing. There are many types of videos you can create for your business, so it’s important to develop a clear video marketing strategy for your business.
Action Steps
Create a video marketing strategy aligned with your overall content strategy and objectives, set up the systems you need to manage it effectively, and schedule regular reviews to make sure that your video marketing strategy is consistently delivering your business its expected targets, continued growth, and a positive ROI.
Resources
The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack – Download a free video marketing starter pack containing videos, templates, resources, and tips on how to get your video marketing strategy going.
Social Media Video Specs Guide – Visit this guide for up-to-date video formatting and file specifications for all the major social media platforms.
Also, see the sections below for additional information and video-related tools and resources that can help you create professional videos and video content inexpensively:
Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.
Here are frequently asked questions about video marketing:
Why is video marketing important?
Video marketing is essential because it enhances engagement, boosts brand awareness, and improves conversion rates by delivering compelling content that resonates with audiences more effectively than text alone.
How do you properly execute a video marketing strategy?
To execute a video marketing strategy effectively, start by defining your goals, understanding your target audience, creating compelling content, optimizing for search engines, and analyzing performance to refine future strategies.
What types of videos are most effective in video marketing?
Product demonstrations, tutorials, customer testimonials, live streams, and company culture videos are among the most effective types because they engage viewers and provide valuable information in an accessible format.
How long should marketing videos be?
The optimal length depends on the platform and your audience’s preferences. Generally, shorter videos (1-2 minutes) work well on social media, while longer formats (up to 10 minutes) can be effective on platforms like YouTube for more detailed content.
How do I measure the success of my video marketing campaigns?
Measure success using metrics such as view count, engagement rate (likes, shares, comments), watch time, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Analytics tools can help track these metrics and provide insights into viewer behavior.
Can video marketing help with SEO?
Yes, videos can significantly boost SEO by increasing the time visitors spend on your site, reducing bounce rates, and providing content that can be ranked in search results, particularly if the videos are properly optimized with the right keywords and meta descriptions.
What platforms should I use for video marketing?
Use a mix of platforms for maximum reach and impact, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The choice of platform should align with where your target audience spends their time and the nature of the content.
How often should I release new videos?
The frequency should be based on your capacity to produce quality content and your audience’s appetite for new videos. Consistency is key, so choose a sustainable schedule, whether it’s weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
What budget should I allocate to video marketing?
Your budget should reflect your marketing goals, the quality of production required, and the expected ROI. Start with a manageable budget and adjust based on the outcomes of your initial campaigns.
How can I make my videos stand out?
Focus on storytelling, use high-quality visuals and sound, ensure your content is authentic and relatable, and consider incorporating interactive elements like Q&A sessions to engage your audience more deeply.
Learn about using emails. autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Learn about using emails, autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
A successful email marketing strategy will help you grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers.
You can then use this list to nurture leads into prospective clients and customers using emails targeted to your audience and distributed through email services and autoresponders.
This lesson will give you a better understanding of using email marketing to grow your business online.
In the wider context of effective content management, it is useful to set goals when implementing an email marketing strategy to include the following:
Integration with Content Strategy: Ensure that email campaigns align with your overarching content strategy to maintain consistency in messaging and branding across all channels.
Ensuring Content Relevance: Deliver targeted email content that resonates with your audience’s interests, preferences, and stage in the customer journey.
Segmenting Email Lists Effectively: Divide the subscriber base into segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and past interactions. Personalize email content to cater to the specific needs, preferences, and interests of each segment.
Optimized Email Design: Design visually appealing emails that are mobile-responsive and easy to read. Incorporate clear calls-to-action (CTAs), compelling visuals, and concise copy.
Consistent Email Cadence: Establish a consistent schedule for sending emails to maintain audience engagement without overwhelming them. This ensures that subscribers anticipate and look forward to receiving your content, leading to better open and click-through rates.
Enhanced Email Deliverability: Ensure emails reach recipients’ inboxes by maintaining sender reputation, optimizing email content, and adhering to email regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act. This fosters better engagement and avoids email being marked as spam.
Improved Email Open Rates: This involves crafting compelling subject lines and preview text to increase open rates. Personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing can also optimize content for higher open rates, driving better campaign performance.
Boosted Click-Through Rates: Develop engaging email content with clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons and relevant links to drive recipients to desired actions, such as visiting a website or making a purchase].
Reduced Unsubscribe Rates: Provide valuable and relevant content to subscribers based on their preferences and behaviors. Regularly review email performance metrics to identify trends and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Performance Tracking and Optimization: Monitor email performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Analyze data to identify trends, optimize content, and refine email strategies for continuous improvement.
Ensuring Email Compliance: Adhere to email marketing regulations and best practices, as well as legal and industry regulations regarding email marketing, including obtaining consent, providing clear opt-out options, honoring unsubscribe requests promptly, and ensuring data privacy and security. Compliance helps build trust with subscribers and mitigates legal risks.
Lifecycle Email Marketing
Lifecycle email marketing is a strategic approach designed to deliver timely and relevant messages to the right audience, guiding them through their journey from awareness to advocacy.
It’s a potent tool for nurturing prospects and customers, influencing purchase decisions, and boosting revenue.
The Power of Lifecycle Emails
There are two key reasons why lifecycle emails are highly effective.
Lifecycle marketing comprehensively addresses all stages of the marketing funnel, including customer acquisition, retention, and upselling, making it a significant revenue driver.
Lifecycle Email Marketing Stages
There are eight stages in lifecycle email marketing:
Awareness: Introduce your brand and grab attention.
Knowledge and Interest: Establish authority and build trust.
Consideration: Nourish interest with targeted content.
Selection: Highlight why your offering is superior.
Purchase: Facilitate conversions and follow up post-sale.
Satisfaction: Ensure customer happiness and engagement.
Retention and Loyalty: Reengage customers and seek upsell opportunities.
Advocacy: Encourage referrals and foster advocacy.
Tailoring Content To Each Lifecycle Phase
Early Phase
Focus on addressing customer pain points without overt selling, building trust through educational content, and setting expectations through welcome emails.
Middle Phase
Continue nurturing post-purchase relationships with thank you emails, onboarding guides, feedback requests, and incentives like discounts or replenishment reminders.
Late Phase
Leverage satisfied customers to drive advocacy through referral programs and reengagement emails, reinforcing relationships built in earlier phases.
Tips For Effective Lifecycle Campaigns
Establish KPIs: Set objectives and benchmarks tailored to each stage to measure success effectively.
Avoid Urgency: Prioritize building value over creating urgency to foster genuine customer engagement.
Personalize Content: Segment your audience based on interests and behaviors to deliver highly relevant content that resonates.
When executed thoughtfully, lifecycle email marketing can be a powerful tool for nurturing customer relationships, maximizing revenue, and cultivating brand advocates.
Understanding the distinct needs of each stage and crafting tailored content accordingly is the key to unlocking the full potential of this strategy.
Why Use Autoresponders?
Another secret of growing a successful business through content marketing is to have an email marketing strategy that allows you to:
Grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers,
Turn subscribers into prospective clients and customers, and
Train/Upsell existing customers.
Building and managing lists with emails using email services and autoresponders allow you to keep in touch with your subscribers and deliver timely or scheduled email messages, training content, and information of value on a regular basis and at the click of a button.
If you’ve ever filled out an opt-in form online to get more information about a product or service, or signed up for an email newsletter and received an instant response in your e-mail inbox, your email reply was most likely sent via an autoresponder program.
Simply put, autoresponders are email programs that send out pre-written messages. These emails can be in response to trigger requests sent to a specific email address or scheduled to be sent out sequentially whenever a new subscriber opts into your service.
An email marketing and autoresponder service can help your business automate your communications with your target audience.
Autoresponders are one of the most powerful online marketing tools you have available for growing your business online. They are easy to use and once you have set things up, your entire marketing can be automated to keep your business growing 24 hours a day on auto-pilot.
When new subscribers sign up, they are instantly added to an automated sales, training, and/or customer relationship system, and remain on your list until they decide to unsubscribe.
Autoresponders can be used in a variety of ways, from sending welcome emails to building customer lists, following up with prospects, and tracking leads through a sales pipeline.
Some autoresponders, like signup services for e-groups and forums, are one-time deals. They provide a single response for every message received (e.g. email a specific address and you get back email instructions on how to join or access the group).
Depending on your email marketing strategy, you could set up multiple autoresponders to target different groups of users or address different needs.
For example, you may want to set up an autoresponder to send out only important product updates to premium-level clients and another autoresponder to grow and nurture leads (and eventually turn these subscribers into premium clients).
Email Drip Feeding And Broadcasting Messages
Email Drip Feeding
With an autoresponder, you can bulk-write your email messages and then drip-feed emails to your subscribers at regular intervals that you specify.
Drip-feed emails to your subscribers using autoresponders and automate your communications.
If you are setting up a series of training emails or an email course, for example, you would create the content of those emails, add these to your autoresponder, and then set up a predetermined schedule to drip-feed your emails and send out messages to your subscriber email addresses.
For instance, you can set up an autoresponder to send subscribers an instant response when they sign up (e.g. a welcome email), then a follow-up message 2-3 days later, then another message 5-7 days after the previous email has been sent, and so on.
You can also program your autoresponder to send one message every day (e.g. an inspirational quote or daily reflection), 2-3 emails per week (e.g. product training or an email course), twice monthly (e.g. a newsletter), once a year (e.g. a subscription renewal reminder), or any interval that works for your audience and keeps them interested and engaged with our email series (and subscribed).
In addition to drip feeding, you can also create a single email message and broadcast it to your list on specific days, times, and intervals of your choice.
Email broadcasting is great for sending out special offers, time-sensitive announcements, product updates, event reminders, breaking news, etc.
Email Marketing Services
Ideally, your business should be capturing visitor details from your website or blog and adding them to your mailing list or newsletter.
There are many self-hosting scripts available, including plugins and add-ons that you can use to send out newsletters and autoresponder messages via your own website or CMS platform.
However, we recommend choosing a reliable third-party (i.e. hosted) service provider to handle your email marketing activities, such as your list-building campaigns, autoresponder setups, subscriber list segmentation, reporting, statistics, etc.
Well-known providers are recognized by Internet Service Providers (ISP) and have higher email deliverability rates. They also provide regular technical support.
We recommend using a reliable email marketing service instead of hosting your own!
With a self-hosted script or plugin, you have to manage all of the technical aspects yourself. While this option may seem sensible while your list is small, as soon as your subscriber base starts to become significant in terms of size and potential value, you run the risk of losing everything if anything happens to your service.
Using a well-known professional autoresponder service ensures reliable email deliverability. The services we recommend using are affordable, provide responsive customer support, and have the infrastructure to keep your data secure. These services also integrate with WordPress, allowing you to build your subscriber list directly from your website or blog.
For example, here’s an email marketing service we use and recommend:
Aweber
You can use a service like Aweber to set up email capture forms for your website and automate your email marketing campaigns.
Aweber is one of the world’s most reliable and popular email delivery services and offers a professional and affordable list-building, autoresponder, and email marketing automation solution with many extensive features like:
Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber, you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types of users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base, and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email, and live text chat.
In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:
Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS feed into emails that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you publish something new on your website or blog.
Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.
To test drive Aweber for free, enter your details into the form below, or click here to sign up for an account:
To learn more about autoresponder services, go here:
Additionally, see this section for more information on email marketing services and tools, including tools for building lists of email addresses for your marketing campaigns: Content Promotion Tools & Resources
Email Marketing And WordPress
If you use WordPress, you can easily add opt-in forms to your site to capture visitor details and turn them into subscribers for your newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
For plugins that can help you integrate email marketing with your WordPress site and add opt-in forms linked to your autoresponder service, go here: WordPress Engagement Plugins
Additional Email Marketing Resources & Information
These useful resources cover areas like creating autoresponders and opt-in forms, and managing your subscriber lists and will help you become a better email marketer:
Write Better Emails
How To Craft The Perfect Email – Free Guide
A FREE, 7-day email course on how to write welcome emails and autoresponder series, plus fill-in-the-blank email templates that will help make sending emails easier.
Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing – Free Guide
If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, this FREE guide will help you master easy email marketing strategies to turn listeners into subscribers, build your brand, and grow your podcast.
Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.
This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.
Here are frequently asked questions about email marketing:
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending emails to a list of contacts to promote products, share news, or provide customer support.
Is email marketing still effective?
Yes, email marketing remains highly effective due to its direct reach and ability to personalize content to diverse audience segments.
How do I build an email list?
Build an email list by offering value through content, using sign-up forms on your website, and encouraging subscriptions through social media and other channels.
What are the best practices for email design?
Keep emails responsive, use eye-catching subject lines, maintain a balance between images and text, and ensure clear call-to-action buttons.
How often should I send emails?
The frequency should be based on your audience’s preferences and the purpose of your emails. Regular testing and feedback can help determine the optimal frequency.
What metrics should I track in email marketing?
Key metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. These indicators help measure engagement and effectiveness.
Why is segmentation important in email marketing?
Segmentation allows you to tailor your messaging to different parts of your audience based on their behavior, demographics, or engagement levels, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.
How can I improve my email open rates?
Improve open rates by crafting compelling subject lines, personalizing emails, optimizing send times, and maintaining a clean email list.
What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email to a small portion of your audience to determine which version performs better before sending the more successful version to the rest of your list.
How do I know if my email marketing is successful?
Success can be measured by looking at analytics to track opens, clicks, conversions, and how these impact your overall marketing goals.
Can email marketing help in customer retention?
Yes, regular and personalized email communication can strengthen relationships with customers, keep them informed, and encourage loyalty.
What are the legal requirements for email marketing?
Compliance with laws like GDPR in Europe and CAN-SPAM in the U.S. is crucial. These laws mandate permissions for email collection and provide guidelines on opt-outs and data protection.
Summary
Launching an effective email marketing campaign with high-converting opt-in forms and autoresponder messages that deliver value to subscribers can mean the difference between struggling online and building a successful and profitable digital business presence.
Build a strong relationship with your subscribers and nurture them by providing content of value at optimal intervals, and the people on your email list may never want to unsubscribe.
Action Steps
If email marketing is important to your business, you can’t afford to risk having disruptions and experiencing regular problems with your email service.
Make sure that you have signed up with a reliable, professional, and well-known email service provider…it will save you time, money, and headaches in the long run!
Resources
Email Marketing Planning Template – Use this free template to organize emails you will send to different segments of your database, track A/B tests, summarize results, gather data on email performance, compile data on Excel or Google Sheets, and automatically calculate delivery, open, and click through rates.
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Content Distribution
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Your business has to share and promote its content using various channels to reach as many people in its target audience as it can.
In this lesson, we cover the following areas:
What Is Content Distribution?
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Content Distribution Channels
Managing Your Content Distribution
What Is Content Distribution?
“Content distribution is the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your content. It’s how you provide your content to your audience members for their consumption through various channels and media formats.”
One of the challenges of promoting content successfully is that businesses today have many different options to get their content in front of people but limited time to manage the process and limited resources to engage in a truly effective multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy.
For example, you can promote your blog posts and other resources via organic and paid channels, using email marketing, video marketing, press releases, pay-per-click advertising, social media, influencer outreach, content syndication, etc.
Some of these methods can also deliver better results if distributed in conjunction with one another, such as posting blogs, videos, social media updates, and email newsletters.
Distributing content in conjunction with other methods can deliver better results.
If we look at the above, for instance:
You can include a video in a blog post and links to your post in a social media post (for free or using paid methods) and an email newsletter.
You can also promote your video on social media (for free or using paid methods) and in your email newsletter, in addition to including it in your blog post.
You can promote your email newsletter on your blog and social media and encourage new subscribers to signup while asking existing subscribers to share your emails on their social platforms with their friends and followers.
You can promote your latest blog posts, videos, or newsletter issues on various social media platforms (for free or using paid methods) and invite them to share these, engage with them, subscribe to them, etc.
To coordinate all of the above content distribution, however, you need a plan.
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Having a plan helps to ensure that your content reaches the right audience, via the right channels, at the right time.
If you haven’t got a content distribution strategy in place, here’s one from HubSpot that you can use.
If you need a content distribution strategy, use this one. Source: HubSpot
Let’s take a brief look at this plan and what you need to do to implement it:
Research your target audience – This should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team.
Choose your content distribution channels – See the section below.
Decide on your content types – See this lesson: Content Types
Set your content distribution KPIs and goals – These should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team and see this lesson: Content Metrics
Your content distribution channels are the channels through which the content you create gets shared and promoted.
Choosing the right distribution channels helps to ensure that your content reaches as many target audience members as possible.
Content distribution channels overlap and can be combined to maximize their impact and reach. Source: Kurve
Your target audience and resources will determine which channels you use to distribute your content.
Traditionally, there are three main types of content distribution channels:
Owned Media
Owned media is any type of content that you create, own, and have full control over.
This content normally resides on your own website (e.g. your blog), your social media accounts, and any additional locations where you store assets that you own.
Owned media can include:
Your website and company blog
Self-hosted videos and podcasts
Images and infographics
E-books and guides
Whitepapers and reports
Recorded webinars
Courses
Email marketing campaigns
Essentially, any content that you create in-house or outsource by hiring people to create or produce it for you where you have an agreement to own the finished content is considered to be owned media.
Paid Media
Paid media is where you pay to promote your content. Paid distribution channels can expose your content to your target audience quickly and more easily than using owned methods, but it costs money and it’s only effective as long as you are paying. If you stop paying, it stops showing.
Paid media should be worked alongside other channels. For example, you can use data collected from successful paid campaigns to drive content creation for owned and earned channels.
Earned Media
Earned media is content that someone else creates, which you haven’t paid for but it benefits your business.
Essentially, this is where someone who is not a part of your organization is giving your organization promotion or coverage.
Earned media can include:
Customer reviews and testimonials
Positive feedback on review sites
Backlinks
Having your products or services featured, included, or mentioned in externally-hosted or published media (e.g. listicles, roundups, newsletters, etc.)
Press/news coverage
Awards and public events
Earned media can be considered as being “organic’ media and can often be generated using owned and paid media, or a combination of these.
For example, if you publish a high-quality content item on your website (owned media) that gains high-ranking authority, share it on your social media channels, and/or promote it using paid channels (paid media), and other companies then link to it or promote it, that’s using owned and paid media to gain earned media.
Shared Media
With recent development in social media, marketers like PR professionals have been asked to embrace a new distribution channel, where the content is partially owned and partially earned, called shared media.
“Shared media is content that is shared across social media or shared between multiple owners. It doesn’t have a concrete, explicit definition, because as social media evolves, shared media changes too.”
An example of shared media is someone liking or commenting on a post on your organization’s Facebook page. This action is recorded on your company’s social media page and the user’s profile but neither your company nor the user owns that content.
The PESO Model – Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media. Source: SpinSucks.com. Click on the above image to enlarge it.
Reciprocal Linking
Although Google disapproves of any form of link spam, reciprocal linking is a widely-used practice on the web.
Typically, this will involve another website offering to link to your site from an existing article on their site if you agree to add a link to their site from an existing article on your site.
Essentially, this is an “I’ll link to your site if you link to my site” arrangement between websites, and it happens all the time.
So, if you plan to engage in reciprocal linking activities with other sites despite what Google says, it’s best to have a set of guidelines that you can supply to anyone who contacts you with an offer to exchange links, especially if the other party is offering to provide you with ready-made content containing a link to your site that you can simply paste into your site as a new post or add to an existing post.
Reciprocal Linking Guidelines
Developing a set of guidelines for how other sites should supply content to you and what you will accept (or reject) will help to reduce time-wasting (e.g. by sending you unacceptable content or content that needs to be completely reworked) and dealing with content that is totally off-brand or that doesn’t match your tone and voice, quality standards, etc.
Here are some things to consider when creating guidelines for accepting reciprocal link exchanges:
Backlinks and anchor texts should match the content and style of your blog posts.
Copy supplied must be in the same format, style, and tone of voice as your blog posts.
Images supplied must meet your minimum image dimensions (to avoid pixelation).
Copy or anchor text must not be hypey or salesy –it should be informative and provide value to your audience.
No links in the introduction or conclusion (this will just send visitors away from your site).
Only add links to relevant articles that provide value to the post & reader (avoid home page, product page, etc links)
Ensure that the link isn’t too close to other links (i.e. not in the same sentence or paragraph as another link)
Anchor text should not exceed four words
Links supplied must be clickable (so you can check where these are pointing to).
As you can see, this is quite a lot of work. however, it’s your credibility and reputation on the line, so you should do your best to protect it.
Balancing Content Quality & Quantity
An additional consideration in your content distribution strategy is the “frequency” of your distribution.
If you post content too often, your audience can become fatigued and start ignoring your content or your new content notifications. If you post too little or too infrequently, your content may not build enough traction for people to engage meaningfully with it.
Your content distribution strategy, therefore, needs to be balanced so that you are not only distributing the right content to the right audience via the right channels but also at the right frequency.
Managing Your Content Distribution
Managing published and distributed content can be challenging. It not only requires managing the content in the channels but the channels themselves.
Knowing which type of channel you use to distribute your content, therefore, can help you to better manage your content.
For example:
Owned Media – This content is completely under your control. So, as long as you have good content management systems and processes in place, you should be able to effectively manage all content in your owned channels.
Owned media pros: You have complete control, you can publish content directly on your site, social networks, etc. and it can cost less overall.
Owned media cons: Your audience can be limited and all your owned channels require maintenance.
Paid Media – Although you have influence over the content in paid media channels, often your control will be limited either by someone else’s rules (e.g. an external webmaster or publication), or by a lack of systems, transparency, or the willingness of 3rd parties to share, divulge, or provide you with full information or access to the management of the content.
For example, if you employ an agency to manage and distribute your content on paid distribution channels, they may have proprietary systems, knowledge, or methods for obtaining results that they may not be willing to divulge, disclose, or share with you.
Paid media pros: Instant results, easier to target your audience, easier to track and measure, and having control over the message and the copy.
Paid media cons: It can be expensive and create a dependency on channels that may not scale as you spend more money.
Earned/Shared Media – One of the main difficulties when managing earned or shared media content is that it’s almost always outside of your control.
Tracking earned or shared content metrics from shares, likes, and followers, for example, doesn’t necessarily give you the ability to manage the content being generated by users or followers. This challenge has even led to the development and adoption of earned media management strategies by communications professionals.
Earned/Shared media pros: Boosts trust and credibility, and increases brand awareness and reach.
Earned/Shared media cons: Can be difficult as it takes time and effort to earn, and can generate negative publicity (e.g. someone could create a meme ridiculing your brand or product and it then gets shared virally online).
It’s important to note that as more cross-channel marketing opportunities arise, what distinguishes one type of distribution channel from another can become a little blurred. This seems to be especially true with social media.
For example, social media is technically earned media, but it also allows for paid media content placements through advertising, “boosted” posts, etc., and owned media (e.g. when you post content on your own social channels via Facebook, X[formerly Twitter], LinkedIn, etc.)
Content Distribution Checklist
Creating valuable content is only half the battle. Effectively distributing that content is equally vital for success. Content distribution ensures your carefully crafted pieces reach the right audience, maximizing their impact.
Use the following comprehensive checklist to streamline your content distribution efforts:
Channel Selection: Identify relevant channels such as social media, email, and third-party platforms.
Audience Segmentation: Tailor content distribution strategies based on your target audience.
Optimized Titles: Craft catchy and SEO-friendly titles to boost click-through rates. These headline generating tools can help.
Performance Metrics: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content metrics and gauge the success of your distribution efforts.
Leverage Influencers: Collaborate with influencers to expand your content’s reach and credibility. Use these social media tools to help you find influencers.
Repurposing Content: Repurpose content for various channels and formats to maximize its utility.
Email Newsletters: Incorporate content into regular email newsletters for consistent engagement.
Monitoring Trends: Stay updated on industry trends to align content distribution strategies accordingly.
User-generated Content: Encourage and amplify user-generated content for authentic engagement.
Content Distribution – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content distribution:
What is content distribution?
Content distribution refers to the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting content across various platforms and media channels to reach a target audience. This can include blogs, social media, email newsletters, and more.
Why is content distribution important?
Content distribution is crucial for maximizing the visibility and impact of your content, helping to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.
What are the main channels for content distribution?
The primary channels for content distribution include owned media (such as websites and blogs), paid media (such as PPC advertising and sponsored posts), earned media (such as press coverage and guest posting), and social media.
How can I develop an effective content distribution strategy?
To develop an effective content distribution strategy, consider the following steps: identify your target audience, select the right channels based on where your audience is active, create high-quality, engaging content tailored for each channel, and use analytics to monitor and optimize your strategy’s performance.
What are some best practices for content distribution?
Best practices include understanding your audience’s preferences, repurposing content for different platforms, maintaining consistency in posting schedules, engaging with your audience, and continually refining your strategy based on analytics.
What are the benefits of a content distribution strategy?
A well-planned content distribution strategy helps increase brand visibility, drives traffic to your website, engages your target audience, and ultimately contributes to lead generation and sales. It ensures your content reaches the right people at the right time through the right channels.
How often should I distribute content?
The frequency of content distribution depends on your specific audience, the nature of the content, and the platforms you are using. It’s important to maintain a balance between keeping your audience engaged and avoiding content overload. Regular analysis and feedback can help refine your content calendar.
Can automation help with content distribution?
Yes, automation tools can significantly aid in scheduling and distributing content across multiple channels, ensuring consistent presence and allowing you to focus on creating quality content and analyzing performance.
Summary
Content distribution is vital to the success of your organization’s content strategy.
What type of content you publish, how you publish it, where you publish it, and how often you publish it can all have a significant impact on your audience’s engagement with your brand.
Content is normally distributed through owned, paid, and/or earned media. Recent developments in social media have seen the emergence of a new distribution channel called shared media.
Make sure that you and your content team clearly understand the different types of distribution channels and the challenges of managing not only the content distributed via those channels but also the channels themselves.
Resources
Content Promotion Kit – Includes a content promotion checklist (PDF), an editable checklist to customize for your business, templates for sharing content with leads, customers, and influencers, and templates for promoting content on social media.
Content marketing is using content to communicate the value of your business to your target audience.
The essence of content marketing is:
Creating valuable and relevant content that builds trust, credibility, and authority with your visitors and customers and makes them want to continue doing business with you.
Using media to increase exposure and sales for your company or organization. This media can be anything you create: blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, images, infographics, special reports, e-books … even software!
Whether you create content items like a blog post, video, e-book, or a forum signature, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of your content is to make a compelling statement that engages your target audience.
This is important because the goal of your content marketing strategy is not to “sell” people a long or short advertisement about your business, but to educate them on how to become your best customers or clients.
Our Free Content Ideas Generation Course shows you how to create content that will get attention, gain your reader’s interest, help build desire for your offer, and encourage them to take the action you want them to take, i.e. click on a link, fill in a form, call to make an appointment, subscribe to your newsletter, share the information on social media, etc.
Content Marketing: Not Talking AT, But WITH Your Visitors
Content marketing is a dynamic process for communicating and engaging with other users online. It is more than just communicating AT visitors and customers. It’s communicating WITH them.
You are not using content to blatantly advertise your business – you are sharing information that will benefit and add value to your target audience.
If you’re using your website to post mostly self-promotional content, there may not be room for dialogue or any type of meaningful engagement with your audience.
In today’s socially interconnected digital world, this type of communication is no longer as effective as it may have been once. Online users quickly become blind to advertising and self-promotion and start tuning these out.
On the other hand, it’s hard to tune out information that benefits you.
Imagine for a moment that your business genuinely helps people to save money and that every time you put out a new piece of content, your readers end up saving money.
Soon, you will have a crowd of people who are paying attention to your content, wanting to hear from you, and sharing your great money-saving tips with others.
People are consuming large amounts of digital information. Look at cable TV and 24-hour news channels. Imagine how much content is required to keep these wheels turning. These networks wouldn’t be thriving if people weren’t hungry for information.
Your business is no different. Your job is to define what type of information your target audience finds meaningful and then provide them with this information.
Define Your Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing strategy differs from your overall content strategy in that your overall content strategy looks at the flow of content through your entire organization, while your content marketing strategy is the part of your content strategy that helps your organization meet its strategic marketing objectives.
Fortunately, many of these areas overlap. So, if your organization has already invested the time and effort to create an overall content strategy, you should be able to use many of its components in your content marketing strategy.
If you need help creating an overall content strategy for your organization, see this lesson.
If you need help creating a content marketing strategy, you can use the one below from HubSpot.
Use this list as a guide to help create your content marketing strategy. Source: HubSpot
Let’s go briefly through each of these components:
Define your goal – Your content marketing goals should be aligned with your organization’s overall content strategy and your marketing plan. Additionally, as explained further below, it’s important to understand which type of content marketing strategy your business should engage in (i.e. B2B, B2C, etc.)
Conduct persona research – Your marketing team should be able to supply you with this information. If you need help with this, go here.
Choose a content management system – This is covered in this lesson.
Determine which type of content you want to create – See the section below or see this lesson.
Brainstorm content ideas – subscribe to our Free Content Ideas Generation Course – you will learn how to never run out of content ideas for your blog, newsletter, or content marketing activities.
Publish and manage your content – Managing your content is covered in the lessons in our content management training module.
Which Content Marketing Strategy Is Right For Your Business?
It’s not only important to develop a content marketing strategy but also to have a clear idea of which type of content marketing strategy your business will engage in.
The type of content marketing strategy you should focus on is determined by the buyer’s reason for purchasing your products or services.
For example…
B2C Content Marketing
If your business promotes products and services to consumers, then your focus should be on developing a B2C content marketing strategy.
A B2C content marketing strategy focuses on creating content that is all about improving the consumer’s life or eliminating personal pain points.
The aim of your content marketing strategy, then, is to not only deliver content that provides value to buyers but also strikes an emotional chord with consumers by appealing to their interests and motivations.
As most consumers tend to make impulsive, emotional, or logical buying decisions either on their own or through the opinions of their friends and family, a B2C content marketing strategy should be focused on generating leads and driving sales based on short sales cycles.
A B2B content marketing strategy focuses mostly on business needs, not personal needs. It also typically involves winning over multiple decision makers, which can mean a longer sales cycle and delivering content that provides a lot more statistical data, proof of effectiveness, and information about ROI.
Understanding which type of content strategy to use (i.e. B2C or B2B) has a significant impact not only on the buyer persona that your content will need to address but also on the type of content, the content formats, and the distribution channels your business will use to make the strategy effective.
A content marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a specific target audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer action.
It outlines the overall goals and objectives for the content, your target audience, the channels through which your content will be distributed, and the metrics by which success will be measured.
A content strategy, on the other hand, is a plan for managing the creation, delivery, and governance of content. It focuses on the long-term vision and direction for the content, the processes and governance that will be used to ensure quality and consistency, and the technologies and platforms that will be used to create, store, and distribute your content.
While a content marketing strategy is a subset of a content strategy, the focus and approach of each are different.
A content marketing strategy is geared towards generating revenue and reaching business objectives, while a content strategy focuses on the overall content lifecycle and management.
A content marketing strategy is mostly focused on the external aspects of the content, how the content will be distributed, and how it will help your business, while a content strategy is more focused on the internal aspects of your content, how it will be created, managed, and governed.
Content Marketing Plan
Creating a content marketing plan typically involves the following steps:
Define your content marketing goals and objectives: Start by identifying what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. Examples of goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving sales.
Understand your target audience: Conduct research to learn more about your target audience, including demographics, pain points, and buying behavior. This will help you create content that is relevant and valuable to them.
Develop buyer personas: Use the information you’ve gathered about your target audience to create detailed buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal customers that help you understand their needs and behaviors.
Identify your content pillars: Choose the main topics or themes that you want to focus on in your content. These should align with your goals and objectives and resonate with your target audience.
Determine your content mix: Decide what types of content you want to create and how you will distribute them. Examples include blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, social media updates, etc.
Create an editorial calendar: Plan out the specific pieces of content you will create and when they will be published. This will help you stay organized and ensure that your content is consistent.
Measure and optimize: Set up a system for tracking your content marketing performance and use the data to optimize your content and strategy. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments as needed.
Review and adjust: Review your content marketing plan regularly, and make changes as needed. Keep your goals and target audience in mind and be prepared to adjust your plan as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t.
It’s important to remember that creating a content marketing plan is an iterative process. While the above steps provide a general framework, you’ll most likely need to make adjustments as you go based on your findings and results.
Content Marketing Plan vs Content Plan
A content marketing plan is a strategy for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a specific target audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer action.
A content plan, on the other hand, is a document that outlines the specific pieces of content that will be created and distributed, as well as the schedule for when they will be published.
While a content plan is a component of a content marketing plan, it is not the same thing. A content marketing plan takes a more holistic approach and focuses on the overall goals and objectives for the content, while a content plan is more focused on the nitty-gritty details of what content will be produced and when.
Your Content Marketing Funnel
The key to creating an effective content marketing strategy is to focus on providing value and using information to help your potential and existing customers understand how your business, company, or organization can add value to their lives.
Essentially, you are using an indirect sales method to create a content pipeline that will enhance the lives of your prospects in a beneficial way.
Like any sales pipeline, the goal of your content marketing strategy is to help turn your visitors into prospects, your prospects into customers or clients, and your clients into your champions.
Content Marketing Sales Funnel
To achieve this goal, you need loyal customers and an active community of users that consume and recommend your products and services to others on a regular basis.
Your content, then, needs to educate, inform, train, engage, empower, and motivate your audience to act and share your information with others.
Your content also needs to be part of a content marketing funnel system that will help you attract prospects and potential clients and guide them from their first interaction with your business through to converting them into paying customers.
TOFU, MOFU & BOFU
There are 3 main stages of the content marketing funnel you need to pay special attention to:
TOFU(top of the funnel) – This content is purely educational and not designed to promote or sell your business. TOFU content aims to attract attention and help your target audience focus on common issues faced by your buyer persona. Examples of TOFU content include eBooks, guides, and checklists.
MOFU(middle of the funnel) – This content is about showing why your business, your solution, and your brand is the best choice. The aim of using MOFU content is to generate leads. A good example of MOFU content is a blog article offering a side-by-side comparison of your products with those of your leading competitors.
BOFU(bottom of the funnel) – This content is about driving purchases and payments by addressing how your product or solution meets your buyer’s specific needs. BOFU content can include free consultations and demos to ask questions and gain a deeper insight into your buyers’ needs and their unique situations.
User intent is different depending on which stage of the funnel they are in and requires setting different goals and measuring different results.
Your content marketing funnel includes TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content. Source: Semrush. Click on the above image to enlarge the image.
What Type Of Content Will You Use To Market Your Business?
Once you have worked out which type of content strategy best suits your business, you need to decide which content types and formats you will create for your target audience and which content distribution channels will be most effective.
This will allow you to produce the right type of content for the right audience, delivered at the right buying stage, through the right distribution channels.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular content types and formats for your content marketing mix.
Blog Posts & Articles
While blog posts and articles are ideally suited for both B2C and B2B content strategies, they differ greatly depending on which audience you are writing these for.
For example, if you are writing for a B2C audience, your articles should focus on storytelling and making the content engaging, relatable, and emotionally appealing, whereas a B2B article or blog post could be a long-form evergreen piece where the content is written in a first-person voice offering an authoritative point of view and focused on problem-solving for key buying-cycle stages and audience segments.
For more information on using blog posts and articles in your content, see the articles and tutorials below:
Images, infographics, charts, and diagrams that summarize complex information such as processes or data are very useful and effective for a B2B audience.
On the other hand, memes, cartoons, comics, user-generated images (eg. someone modeling a product or showing a new item they have purchased), funny animated gifs, etc. can go a long way with B2C readers.
For example, here’s one way a gardening services company could communicate the importance of hiring professionals to mow lawns using images…
Source: giphy.com
For more information on using images and infographics in your content, see the articles and tutorials below:
Videos and webinars work well for both B2B and B2C audiences.
With videos, make sure to match the video content, duration, and quality to suit the right audience type.
For example, video tutorials (and webinars) with product walkthroughs allow users to better understand a product or service. Depending on the intended audience, however, the video content (or recorded webinar) will either emphasize benefits over features (or vice-versa), be of a longer or shorter duration, use a more entertaining or educational voice, be shot and edited professionally or captured using a phone camera, use different font styles, titles, annotations, timestamps, etc.
For more information on using videos and webinars in your content, go here:
Social media content is very effective with B2C audiences.
However, you can also help B2B audiences influence other decision-makers and shorten the sales cycle process by sharing time-saving bite-sized content on social media about complex aspects of your product or industry, useful statistics, sound or video bites, and compelling testimonials or reviews that can be quickly and easily forwarded or shared.
Social Media Networks
Make sure to set up social media accounts for all the social media platforms that you plan to post content to, e.g.:
Sending out regular email newsletters allows you to stay top of mind with existing and potential customers or clients.
Just make sure to plan your content appropriately for your audience. Educational emails or relevant industry news and events can help to establish yourself as an active, informed, and authoritative member of your professional community or industry for B2B clients, whereas B2C emails may be more emotionally charged to try and get readers to click on a “buy now” link.
Additionally, using email for outreach campaigns to increase backlinks and forge new partnerships with other businesses can be an effective B2B use of email content marketing.
For more information about using emails in your content marketing mix, go here:
A B2B content marketing mix typically includes the production of eBooks, Guides, and Whitepapers with content aimed at showing users how to solve business problems or increase ROI, profitability, efficiency, etc.
eBooks and guides that help users solve their personal needs work well for B2C audiences. Examples of this include ebooks and guides on health, fitness, beauty, cooking recipes, personal care tips, tips for dieting and weight management, travel, etc.
Depending on the audience your content is aimed at, different decisions will need to be made about areas like content design, layout, navigation, use of different embedded media, etc.
For more information about using eBooks in your content marketing mix, go here:
Podcasts with regular or episodic content like opinions, commentary, or interviews with industry thought leaders built around a consistent theme or framework are a great way to establish a personal connection, trust, authority, and credibility, build a dedicated and loyal following and get potential customers or clients coming back for more.
Providing links to downloadable templates, free calculators, checklists, etc. in your content where appropriate is an excellent way to attract B2B prospects.
Companies that market to B2B audiences like HubSpot use this method very effectively.
Hubspot offers many free downloadable templates to generate leads, such as this free email marketing planning template. Source: Hubspot.
Templates, checklists, and calculators also make great lead magnets.
Lead Magnets
A sound content marketing strategy involves creating valuable content that will not only drive traffic to your site and keep readers engaged but also help move your prospects forward through the traffic generation, lead generation, and sales conversion phases of your online sales funnel.
If you plan to grow a list of subscribers, then, in addition to producing great content for your articles and posts, you will also need to create valuable ‘lead magnets.’
A lead magnet is a compelling incentive or ‘ethical bribe’ that you offer to visitors in exchange for getting them to opt into your list and give you their email address or other contact information.
Examples of free lead magnets you can offer to attract subscribers include:
Access to a coaching or support group
Apps / software
Audios
Cheat sheets
Checklists
Contest entries
Coupons
Ebooks and PDF guides/reports
Gear/resource lists
Infographics
Licensing
Membership sites
Mind maps
Planners
Process maps
Services
Swipe files
Templates
Videos
Webinars
Developing A Content Marketing Management Plan
Having a clear and well-defined content marketing strategy is important.
However, without a content marketing management plan, how can you ensure that your efforts and spending on content marketing activities are delivering results and a positive return on your investment?
A content marketing management plan involves:
Documenting your content marketing strategy
Tracking your content marketing performance
Managing your content marketing expenses
Let’s take a brief look at each of these areas.
Document Your Content Marketing Strategy
According to research, 60% of the most successful B2B businesses that use content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy, while only 21% of the least successful ones have one.
The companies that are most successful with content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy. Source CMI
Having a documented content marketing strategy helps you justify your content marketing efforts, tactics, channels, and budget, and ensures consistency in your organization’s content marketing activities.
It’s important to track the performance of all your content marketing activities, as there are typically so many different options and opportunities to promote your content but only limited time and resources to pursue all these different options (and not all of these may be opportunities worth pursuing).
Measuring your content marketing performance can help you answer questions like:
Which content type delivers the best ROI?
Which is a better investment of your time and resources: producing video content, running webinars, or writing ebooks?
Which article topics and other characteristics (e.g. word count) deliver the highest engagement, leads, and sales conversions?
Which social media platform should you focus most of your advertising efforts on?
etc.
For more information on tracking your content marketing performance, see these sections:
More companies today aim to build their business with the goal of generating monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Your business probably does too.
While this is a smart goal, the flip side of this is that more businesses today have to sustain monthly or annual subscriptions for all kinds of sales, advertising, marketing, and management services, tools and software, memberships, support, maintenance, and upgrade plans, in addition to web hosting, domain renewals, etc.
Needless to say, your content marketing efforts and activities must be able to justify the content marketing expenditure involved and hopefully still produce a positive ROI.
Doing this, however, requires documentation (e.g. a spreadsheet where all regular expenses and subscriptions are logged) and the ability to effectively track and analyze your content marketing performance so you can determine which methods, activities, and services are assets vs liabilities.
This will help you answer questions like:
Which paid services, tools, etc. are worth keeping?
Which subscriptions are not delivering a sustainable ROI?
Are there any non-essential paid services that can be dropped or swapped for similar free services?
Are there any essential services that are costing money but need to remain active? Can these costs be reduced or can the service be transferred to another provider that costs less?
Etc.
Content Marketing – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content marketing:
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Why is content marketing important?
It helps businesses build trust with their audience, improve conversions, connect with customers, and generate leads. In today’s age, transparency and trust are key to consumer retention.
How do I start with content marketing?
Begin by identifying your audience, understanding their needs, and defining your content marketing goals. Then create a content strategy that addresses these needs through various forms of content like blogs, videos, and social media posts.
What types of content should be included in a content marketing strategy?
It should include a variety of content types such as blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, and social media content to engage different segments of your audience.
How do I measure the success of my content marketing efforts?
Measure success through metrics like website traffic, lead generation, sales linked to content efforts, social media engagement, and SEO performance. Tools and analytics platforms can provide insights into how well your content is performing.
What are the best practices for content marketing?
Focus on quality over quantity, understand your audience, use SEO to enhance online visibility, be consistent in your posting schedule, and always evaluate and adapt your strategy based on performance data.
How often should I publish new content?
The frequency of publishing depends on your team’s capabilities and the preferences of your audience. Analyze your traffic and engagement to determine the right balance, but consistency is key for building an audience.
Can small businesses benefit from content marketing?
Absolutely, small businesses can build brand awareness and attract more customers without needing large advertising budgets by focusing on creating high-quality content that resonates with their target audience.
Is content marketing expensive?
It can be cost-effective compared to traditional marketing techniques. While it does require investment in time and resources, the long-term benefits often outweigh the costs if executed well.
How does content marketing fit into an overall digital marketing strategy?
It plays a central role, complementing and enhancing other marketing efforts such as SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. Content is the backbone of these strategies, driving engagement and offering value to users.
Summary
Having a clear and well-defined content marketing strategy is very important, as is having a content marketing management plan to ensure that your efforts and spending on various methods, services, and tools are consistently delivering results and a positive return on investment.
Action Steps
In addition to creating and implementing a content marketing strategy, make sure that your business also has an effective content marketing management plan for documenting and tracking performance, results, and associated expenses.
Resources
Content Marketing Workbook – Use this free downloadable workbook to develop a content marketing strategy for your business.
Content Troubleshooting Guide -Use this guide to help you troubleshoot issues with your content marketing strategy and improve your content management practices.
Learn how to manage your content SEO to help improve your website’s search engine results.
Content SEO
Learn how to manage your content SEO to help improve your website’s search engine results.
Google defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the process of making your site better for search engines.
If your business depends on managing, monetizing, or promoting online content using Google Search, then it’s important to learn about SEO best practices to ensure that your content can be made easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand, resulting in improved rankings, more traffic to your website, and a better user experience overall.
As more companies compete for search engine results dominance and supremacy, it’s important to make every advantage count, however slight.
In this lesson, we focus on strategies and methods you can apply to your content to help improve your ranking.
As stated in this module’s overview section, the purpose of this lesson is not to provide a course on search engine optimization, but to help you understand the role of content management as it relates to using SEO in content promotion.
There are many great resources online to help you learn SEO. We list a number of these resources at the end of this lesson in the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ section.
Essentially, what Google is telling us is that your website content should be geared towards helping people understand your content better.
In other words, focus on creating quality content for real users, not search engine robots.
The role of content management in SEO, then, can be boiled down to this single principle: “create quality content”.
As this is what Google’s search engine algorithms seek to reward, let’s start this lesson by looking at exactly what constitutes “quality content” as Google sees it.
Quality Content Is SEO Content
Let’s face it…although Google is not the only search engine in town, it is the search engine that matters the most, so if you focus on developing quality content that meets Google’s guidelines and specifications, you will pretty much guarantee your content’s chance of succeeding on all other search engines.
Fortunately, Google provides extensive documentation on how to meet its quality guidelines.
For example, here is a section of their blog offering excellent advice on how to self-assess the quality of your content to make sure that you are offering the best content you can. Ask yourself these questions:
Content and quality questions
Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
Expertise questions
Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely recognized as an authority on its topic?
Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?
Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?
Presentation and production questions
Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues?
Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?
Comparative questions
Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
For additional questions that will help you determine whether your content meets Google quality standards, see this section of their blog: What Counts As A High-Quality Site?
If you are tracking your content’s performance and notice a significant drop in page rankings, use the above questions to perform a content audit and assess whether quality may be a factor in the search drops.
Improve Content SEO With User Feedback
In addition to self-assessing your content using the above questions, Google suggests getting feedback from unaffiliated users of your site who can provide an honest assessment of your site and content quality.
This can either take the form of user studies or simply trusting Google’s processes for determining what constitutes “quality” content.
User Studies
Running user studies can help you understand how real people feel about your site and your content. For example, a platform like UserTesting.com can help you gain insights and feedback about your site’s usability and the quality of your content from real human users.
You can then use this feedback to improve your content’s SEO.
Search Quality Raters
Google contracts thousands of people (called “search quality raters”) to provide insights aimed at improving its algorithm for ranking quality content in the search results.
The video below provides an overview of how Google uses raters to improve its search results…
Search Quality Raters follow specific guidelines designed to assess whether Google’s algorithm is indeed ranking quality content in accordance with its own guidelines.
Use Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines to help improve your content quality.
These guidelines are explained in a comprehensive document that is made available to everyone for free and can be downloaded here: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
Additional Tips For Improving Content SEO
E-E-A-T
An important part of Google’s algorithm for ranking quality content is E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.
E-E-A-T is one of many guidelines Google uses to determine whether the content is high-quality, valuable to readers and if it should rank well. While it’s not a ranking factor in itself, it can have an indirect impact on your content’s overall search rankings.
Making your site more authoritative and trustworthy includes making sure your site has an About Us page that tells visitors who you are, Author Pages (whether your site has one or multiple article contributors), content written with expertise, a clear purpose that is regularly updated, and more.
On August 2022, Google launched the “helpful content update” as part of their broader effort to provide search engine users with original, helpful content written by people, for people.
Essentially, the update is aimed at rewarding content creators who focus on “people-first” content, instead of a “search engine-first” approach.
Content that Google deems to provide visitors with a satisfying experience will perform better than content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations.
The “helpful content update” is simply an extension of Google’s long-standing advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines. The content can still utilize SEO best practices but it should primarily focus on creating satisfying content for users,
The post on Google’s blog provides a list of questions you should ask to make sure that the content you are creating for your organization aligns with a people-first approach
For example:
Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
The post also provides questions to ask that will raise warning signs if answered “yes” and help you reevaluate how you’re creating content across your site.
For example:
Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (Google doesn’t).
Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?
The “helpful content update” introduces a new site-wide signal that will run continuously and be considered among Google’s many other signals for ranking web pages. It will automatically identify content that appears to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people searching for information online.
In addition to focusing on “people-first” content, Google suggests removing unhelpful content from your site, as it could help improve the rankings of your other content.
Google’s approach to ranking high-quality content in search results prioritizes quality over the production method, whether it is human-generated or AI-generated.
Google advises publishers to focus on producing people-first content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and that using automation or AI solely to manipulate rankings is considered a violation of Google’s spam policies.
Google’s focus on rewarding quality content, regardless of production method, continues to this day through its ranking systems and helpful content system introduced last year. It will continue to combat the use of automation and AI-generated content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.
Google realizes, however, that not all use of automation and AI-generated content is spam. For example, many publishers provide automated helpful content such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. Google, therefore, aims to take a measured and responsible approach toward AI-generated content while maintaining its standards for information quality and helpfulness in search results.
Publishers should make it clear who created the content and provide background information about the author. It is helpful to disclose whether automation or AI was involved in the content production process and explain why it was used.
Finally, the purpose of creating content should be to help people rather than to manipulate search rankings. By following these guidelines, publishers can stay in line with what Google’s systems reward, regardless of whether the content is human-generated or AI-generated.
Google Search Visual Elements Guide
If you need help understanding the terminology used by Google to improve your content, page, or website SEO, use the illustrations and definitions in Google’s Visual Elements Guide to identify common search features in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Use Google’s Visual Elements guide to identify over 20 elements of a search result page. Source: Google.
A Google SERP includes key elements such as Attribution, Text results, Rich results, Video & image results, and Exploration features (e.g. “People Also Ask.”
Each of these elements is explained visually with illustrations showing you how these might look in search results and depictions of the different features included in each of these main search elements.
Learn about search features of key elements, such as “attribution” in Google’s Visual Guide. Source: Google.
Google’s Visual Guide To Search Elements includes information on over 20 search features with more to be added over time.
Publish Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is search-optimized content that remains relevant and “fresh” long after it has been published and continues to grow traffic over time.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to think about ways to make your content as “evergreen” as possible during your content planning phase, especially when creating cornerstone content, as these will be the most important articles that you will want to rank highest in the search engines.
Here are some simple ways to move toward ensuring that your content stays “evergreen”:
First, make sure that your post slug (i.e. the words in your URL) DO NOT contain dates, numbers, or words like “new,” “launch”, “special-offer”, etc.
For example, avoid creating URLs like:
7-top-job-quoting-sites-2022 – Drop the date from the slug. Also, you may need to add more job sites later or one or more of those sites may go out of business. Evergreen URL suggestion: top-job-quoting-sites
Making your post slug evergreen doesn’t affect your Post Title in terms of SEO.
For example, the site shown below features an article with the URL: international-dot-day-get-involved and the post title International Dot Day: Get Involved!.
International Dot Day happens every year, but this article’s URL doesn’t need to be updated. Source: TheEdublogger.com
You can leave the URL and the content as is to keep this post evergreen and simply do the following as shown below to improve its SEO:
Change the post title each year (e.g. 2022, 2023, 2024, etc.)
Update the post publishing date when you republish.
You can, however, change the Post title to improve the article’s SEO. Note: If the rest of the content is evergreen, you can leave it alone.
You may still need to do some editing to keep the content current, but you won’t need to change the post URL or create a new article (and redirect the old post to the new one).
Anchor Text
What Is An Anchor Text?
An anchor text (or link text) is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink that allows users to navigate from one webpage to another.
Anchor text helps users and search engines understand what the destination webpage is all about and is often given a different look than the rest of the text on a page (e.g. it can be blue, bold, and underlined, like this link to our homepage.)
If we examine the structure of an anchor text, here are its most basic components:
Anatomy of a basic anchor text link.
In the above example of the link code, the domain URL inside the HTML tags is the link target (i.e. the destination URL where visitors clicking on the link will be sent to) and ‘Tawny Frogmouth’ is the visible anchor text for the link.
Anchor Text Types
There are different types of anchor text for internal and external link types:
Exact-match – Including an “exact match” of the page being linked to in the anchor text. For example, linking content promotion to the Content Promotion course lesson page of this site.
Partial-match – Using anchor text that includes a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example, learn how to perform a content audit in our Content Audit lesson.
Branded – Using a brand name as anchor text. For example: ‘Google’ linking to an article on Google’s help site.
Generic – Using generic words or phrases as anchor text. Common examples are “click here”, “read this article”, “visit this page”, “read more”, etc.
Images – When images are linked, Google will use the image’s alt attribute text as the anchor text.
How To Optimize Anchor Text
Search engines consider anchor text to be a reflection of how people view your page and use it to try and understand what your pages are about.
If many sites think that a specific page is relevant for a set of terms, that page can often rank well even if the terms don’t appear in the text of the page itself.
Ensure that your anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to. The anchor text should accurately describe the page or the topic you are linking to and make it clear to users what information they can expect to find when they click on the link.
Keep your anchor text concise, descriptive, and succinct. Don’t use unnatural-looking long sentences as your anchor text.
Keep anchor text natural and informative and use keyword-rich anchor text sparingly.
Format links to make them stand out from your regular text and make them easier for users to spot. You can change your website’s link colors and anchor text styles using HTML or CSS.
While you typically can’t control how other sites link to your, “you can make sure that anchor text you use within your own site is useful, descriptive, and relevant.” Irrelevant anchor text can confuse both users and search engines.
Using the same anchor text repeatedly can come across as being spammy (to users and search engines) especially exact-match anchor text, so vary the anchor text used throughout your content (i.e. use relevant partial-match variations).
Avoid using generic anchor text whenever possible, as these provide no context, information, or help to users about the topic they will see if they click on the link.
Avoid using naked links as anchor text whenever possible, except when quoting these for reference.
Avoid over-optimizing anchor text, as this can lead to SEO penalties from Google.
Do not use excessive cross-linking, as users and search engines view too many links going to and from the same pages as suspicious.
Internal linking is a proven way to boost your SEO.
When you interlink your articles, you give search engines like Google an opportunity to crawl through your site to discover and index new pages and new content.
When other websites link to your site using a dofollow backlink, that website passes “SEO link juice” (i.e. authority) to your page.
If your pages follow a good internal linking strategy, this authority can spread to all of the other pages that you are linking to.
A content audit can tell you which pages or posts on your site are most important. These are the pages or posts you should be linking to more frequently from your other articles.
See what we’ve just done in the paragraph above? We created an internal link to our content audit lesson.
To find content on your site that you can link to internally, use the following search string on Google:
site:yourwebsite.com topic
This will bring up all the articles you have published on your site for that keyword or keyword phrase.
You can find all topic-related articles on your site using the ‘site:’ search operator.
You can also use other linking methods like automatic keyword linking to boost the effectiveness of internal linking as an SEO strategy.
Learn more about using hyperlinks in your content in our Link Management lesson.
Speaking of links…
Check For Broken Links
Broken links not only deter visitors from staying on and returning to your site, but they can also negatively impact your search engine rankings.
Broken links in your content can impact your search results. Use broken link-checking tools to help you fix this.
We recommend checking for broken links as part of your site’s maintenance, content reviews, etc.
For tools that can help you check and fix broken links, go here:
It’s a good idea to let search engines know when you change or redirect the URL of a post or page on your website to another page or website.
If your site uses WordPress, for example, then you can easily do this using a plugin like Redirection.
Use a plugin like Redirection to let search engines know when you redirect URLs on your site.
Simply enter the old URL (i.e. the Source URL) and the new URL (the Target URL), click a button, and the plugin will add the necessary code to your site to inform search engines that the page with your content has moved to a new location.
It’s also a good idea to trash the old post from your site if it’s no longer needed. This helps to keep your content organized and reduces the size of your site’s database.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags help both users and search engines better understand your content. They tell search engines what your page is about, how to read it, and who should see it.
Although meta tags do not influence search engine rankings as such, they can help with SEO indirectly by improving areas like content engagement (e.g. making content more compelling to readers and boosting click-through rates) and content organization.
Some common meta tags where you can use custom content to improve on-page SEO include:
Meta Title – The version of the post/article title you want to present to search engines.
Meta Description – Provides a descriptive summary of your page’s content.
Post Slug – The section of the URL (web address) that shows after the domain name (and other classification elements like ‘categories’, ‘publish dates’, etc. if configured in your website’s settings).
Heading Tags (H1-H6) – These help to identify headings and subheadings in your content from other types of text (e.g. paragraph text), and are important for organizing your content (e.g. they help break your content into different sections for your readers).
Image Alt Tags – These describe images used in your content to search engines and people who may not be able to see your content, like visually impaired users (see ‘Alt Tags’ section below).
Social Media Meta Tags – These let you control how your page will look when shared on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Let’s look at a practical example of using meta tags to improve your content for readers and search engines.
As shown in the screenshot below, you can publish an article on your blog with a “catchy” Post Title to engage readers while using a different Meta Title to display the article in the search engines using the keywords you would like to rank for.
In the screenshot below, we have also crafted a better post slug (using more concise and relevant words), and a more enticing and compelling meta description.
Use Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Post Slugs to improve user engagement and search engine rankings.
Meta Tags like meta descriptions display as snippets of text in the search engine results under your headline.
You can control how your meta descriptions appear in search engine listings, although sometimes, search engines will choose a snippet of text from your page’s content instead if it deems it to be a more relevant match to what users are searching for.
Meta titles and descriptions help users and search engines to better understand your content.
If your website runs on WordPress, you can use an SEO plugin to customize the meta tags for your blog posts.
Improve your content SEO with WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO.
Some SEO plugins like SmartCrawl, for example, not only let you control how your meta descriptions will display in the search results but they also provide built-in visual guides and best practice character limit counters to help you optimize your SEO titles and descriptions.
SmartCrawl’s meta descriptions tool lets you control how your articles will display on Google’s search result listings.
You can view the meta tags section of any web page by loading the page into your web browser, right-clicking on the page, and then selecting either ‘view source’ or ‘view page source’ depending on which browser you use.
Right-click on a web page and select ‘View Page Source’.
The page code will load into your browser and display your meta tags section.
The meta tags section of your web page contains your meta description and other important information for search engines, social media, etc.
To view your meta description tag, look for a section like this:
This is the snippet of text that should display in the search results when users search for keywords that your page ranks for.
Google recommends using quality descriptions in your meta descriptions and provides examples of good and bad descriptions in its guidelines for search snippets.
Make sure to create quality meta descriptions for your content.
To learn more about using meta tags and optimizing these to improve your content’s SEO, see the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ section at the end of this lesson.
Image Alt Tags & Captions
An alt tag (also called an alt attribute) is the text used to describe an image if, for some reason, the image doesn’t load in the user’s browser.
For example, hopefully, the image below is displayed on this page…
Feel free to express yourself with image captions but be more descriptive when using alt tags. Source: WPMU DEV
However, if it wasn’t, this is what you would see…
If an image doesn’t display, users will see the alternative text instead.
You can view an image’s alt tag by inspecting the source code of the web page.
This image has an alt tag, as you can see in the page’s source code.
Adding descriptive alt tags and captions to your images not only helps your site meet web content accessibility guidelines but is also good for SEO, as these help search engines figure out the context of your page content and better index your images.
See the ‘References’ section for tutorials on using alt tags and optimizing your images for SEO.
Schema Markup
Search engines want to make it easier for people to find relevant information on the web.
Schema markup is a form of microdata that helps search engines better understand the information on web pages and return more informative results for users.
As explained on Schema.org…
“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”
Adding schema markup code to web pages creates an enhanced description that search engines use to provide users with richer search results (also known as rich snippets).
Rich snippets added with schema markup tell search engines what the content means.
There are hundreds of different schema types covering things, people, places, actions, relationships, and more, and each of these different types includes many associated properties.
Rich snippets generated using schema markup can be used to display all kinds of useful information, including product images, prices, and stock levels, star ratings for reviews, store operating hours, events and dates, and a whole lot of other data.
Rich snippets provide additional useful information to users on search results.
Structured data markup like schema, then, helps to organize the data on your web pages. This not only helps search engines understand your content but also the context of certain words in it.
While there is no evidence that adding structured schema markup to your web pages has a direct effect on your organic search rankings and how Google ranks your content, rich snippets can have a positive SEO impact by improving your content’s visibility and making your web pages display more prominently in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This can lead to better click-through and lower bounce rates, resulting in more traffic to your website and better engagement with users. Schema, then, should be considered an important aspect of your overall content’s SEO strategy.
For example, instead of having to generate, copy, and paste code into your website, an SEO plugin like SmartCrawl lets you easily select and configure different schema types and rules using wizards and menus.
Using an SEO plugin like SmartCrawl for WordPress sites makes it easier to add schema markups to your web pages…
Each time you create a new article for your blog that matches the rules you have specified, your site will automatically output the schema markup code required for the search engines.
… and output the schema markup code search engines need to display rich results to users.
Build Topical Authority
Topical Authority is where you increase the ranking of existing articles on your site by publishing more articles related to that topic.
To do this, find posts or pages on your site that are already ranking highly (e.g. in positions 2-3) and then create more articles on that topic.
Google will then assume that you are an expert on that topic even if your new articles don’t bring in that much traffic. This can sometimes help your site outrank larger and more authoritative sites.
See the Search Optimization Tools section for tools you can use to identify articles on your site that could benefit from this strategy.
Use Sitemaps
Is your content easy to reach? Can users get to any page on your site in three clicks or less?
You can improve your content’s SEO by making it easier for search engine spiders (i.e. search bots) to crawl your website and discover all of your site’s content using sitemaps.
Make sure to add your site’s XML sitemap and RSS feed to your Google Search Console account.
Adding your XML sitemap and RSS feeds to Google Search Console helps Google find and index your content faster.
Search Intent
As explained further below, there has been a shift in content creation strategy in recent years away from keyword-driven SEO to a search intent-driven and “topic cluster” approach in order to better align with Google’s algorithm changes.
Search intent is the reason why someone would write a query and submit it to search engines. It represents an objective that the searcher is trying to accomplish through their online journey.
These are by no means all the types available. New search intent types (as well as micro intents) can be found when niches exhibit new identifiable search patterns and clusters.
Let’s take a brief look at each of these types:
Informational
These searches have a recognized need with no clear solution. The searcher’s intention is simply to seek information, locate a particular topic or informational snippet, and ask general questions to learn about something they may be struggling with or better understand potential pathways to a solution.
Informational searches typically contain words like: what, why, how, when, who, which, does, learn, tips, ideas, tutorial, guide, examples, resource, etc.
Navigational
These searches indicate brand awareness and a desire to locate information or pages related to an institution or organization they are already brand-aware of.
The searcher is interested in navigating to a specific destination, e.g. a brand website, a product page, or a solutions landing page.
Navigational searches typically include brand names, product names, service names, locations, or keywords such as: near me, directions to, prices, cost of, etc.
Commercial
Commercial search intent combines characteristics of informational, navigational, and transactional types. The searcher’s intent is to compare, evaluate and analyze organizations, vendors, and solutions they are already aware of (and possibly discover new ones in the process), and consider their options.
Commercial searches typically contain words like: buy, price, cheap, cheapest, expensive, coupon, price, pricing, order, purchase, recommendation, recommended, etc.
Transactional
There is a recognized need or desire to obtain something other than information. For example, the searcher may be looking to perform a web-mediated transaction of a recognized product, service, or solution. In other words, the user’s search intent is purchase-oriented.
Transactional searches typically contain words like: top, best, review, cheap, cheapest, vs, compare, comparison, etc.
Local
This type of search intent is characterized by a desire to find a solution or complete a transaction to a recognized need that is located in close physical and geographical proximity to the user.
Here, the user’s intent is to perform an information and transactional search with the goal of then making a physical (or web-mediated) purchase nearby.
Local searches typically contain words like: near me
***
The types listed above also correspond to the different parts of the marketing funnel (i.e. the buyer’s journey toward purchasing).
In simple terms, the lower down the search intent funnel, the higher the likelihood of conversion.
The lower down the search intent funnel, the higher the likelihood of conversion. Source: Lazarina Stoy
Search Intent And Content Creation
Understanding search intent and where this places the user in your marketing funnel plays a significant part in the type of content you create.
“Understanding the query is the first step in evaluating the task.”
The more you know about your industry and your target audience, the better you will understand search intent. You can then use this knowledge and understanding to create content better targeted to your audience’s search needs and to optimize your existing pages based on the intent they ultimately serve.
For example:
Resource pages (Informational intent) – Blog posts, guides, listicles, resources
Company pages (Navigational intent) – Home Page, About us, Contact us, Company Values, Careers Page, Request a quote, etc.
Product Pages (Transactional intent) – Product pages, service pages, solutions pages, portfolio/what we do, etc.
Keyword Density
Keyword Density refers to the number of times a specific keyword appears on a web page as a percentage or ratio of the total word count.
The higher the ratio, the more the selected keyword appears on your page. If this ratio is too high, Google may perceive this as “keyword stuffing“.
General guidelines for acceptable keyword density levels suggest using the keyword 1-2 times per 100 words (less than 2.5% of the total word count.)
Use LSI and Long-Tail Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) are search terms or words related to the keyword that you’re targeting.
Long-tail keywords are search queries that tend to be longer and more specific than “broad” keywords. For example, “how to meditate” is a broad keyword search, but “can meditation slow down heart rate” is a long tail keyword. Long-tail keywords typically get a smaller number of searches per month than broad keywords but they are more targeted and often signify buyer’s intent (e.g. if someone is searching for ausclimate cool seasons premium 10L desiccant dehumidifier review, they are probably already close to making a buying decision).
Both LSI terms and long-tail keywords provide search engines with context that help them determine what your page is about.
Google is continually improving its algorithm to better understand the search intent behind a user’s search query.
In other words, Google is getting better at knowing what users are searching for and no longer needs to try and match exact keywords to rank and display content, so it can show pages that are relevant to user searches even if those pages are not optimized for the specific keywords being searched.
For example, you can use Google autocomplete tool to find LSI and long-tail keywords (or use some of the tools listed in the SEO Tools section).
To find LSI keywords, search for a generic keyword related to your topic…
Searching for generic terms in Google brings up related keywords in the autocomplete tool.
And to find long-tail keywords search for a more specific keyword…
Use Google’s autocomplete tool to find long-tail keywords by digging a little deeper.
You can also use Google Search Console to see what keywords you may be already ranking for but not using on the page or content that’s ranked.
Use Google Search Console to find related keywords to improve your content SEO.
Use “People Also Ask” and Related Search Phrases
Google monitors user behavior on websites and uses behavior signals to determine whether your content is helpful to users or not.
For example, if users click from Google’s search results to your website and stay on your site, that’s good. If they land on your site and click the back button or go to a different site, that’s bad.
Google wants to present users with sites that deliver what they are looking for and help solve their problems. You can make it easier for Google to rank your pages higher by not only covering your topic well but also by including related subtopics that will make your content more complete and authoritative and turn your site into the “go-to” resource for users looking for information in your niche.
In addition to the tools we have covered earlier, you can use tools like ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related Searches’.
Google lists questions that previous users have searched for in the ‘People also ask’ section. Use this tool to identify problems that users are searching for and help them solve these with your content.
Use Google’s ‘People also ask tool’ to make your content more complete and authoritative.
Google’s ‘Related Searches’ section at the bottom of its results pages is a goldmine of useful information. Use this tool to identify additional long-tail keywords that your competitors might be ignoring and use these in your content to improve your rankings.
Use Google’s Related Searches to improve your rankings.
You can boost content SEO effectiveness further by combining search intent knowledge with long-tail and LSI keywords (or replacing certain words with their synonyms) in your content.
International Keyword Research
Performing international keyword research for SEO purposes has its own complexities and challenges.
As sophisticated as tools like Google Translate are becoming, it’s still very difficult to overcome translational hurdles such as the same words meaning different things in different languages, semantic, cultural, or regional differences, idioms, dialects, homonyms (words that are spelled the same, and sound the same but have different meanings), homographs (words that are spelled the same but sound different and have different meanings), etc.
For this reason, depending on the type of content you are creating and your SEO goals, you may want to employ an expert, specialist, or native translator instead of relying on machine translation tools.
Create An Outreach Email Template
Backlinks are an important factor for getting your pages ranked and building domain authority but building backlinks is difficult if your company is not proactively engaged in doing SEO marketing.
Although email outreach has a low success rate, having an outreach email template you can use after publishing new content to contact other companies and ask them to link to your site can be a tremendous help to your content promotion efforts.
One additional backlink from an authority site can do wonders to boost your site’s ranking on Google.
Google detects policy-violating content through automated systems and human reviews. If your content violates any of Google’s spam policies, it can lead to your page(s) or website ranking lower in results or not appearing in the results at all (i.e. being de-indexed from Google Search).
For this reason, your content management practices should include reviewing your content regularly to make sure it’s not violating Google Search’s overall policies or any of the spam policies listed below:
The traditional content model consists of a website with a blog and articles or blog posts published under different blog categories.
This is fine. If you are writing articles or blog posts based on the keywords you want to rank for, however, your blog can become quickly filled with repetitive, bloated, and disorganized content, making the information harder to manage.
Focusing on keywords can lead to disorganized content that’s harder to manage.
Over the past several years, content creation strategy based on Google search ranking has been shifting away from keyword-centric SEO to topic-focused SEO and ranking content based on search intent-driven topics, not keywords.
So, while traditional keyword research based on criteria like keyword volume and keyword competition is still useful for content planning, it’s important to understand the concept of Topic Clusters and how to implement this model if you want to rank for multiple keywords on different topics.
Topic Clusters
A topic encompasses a collection of keywords that explain your subject matter.
A topic cluster is a group of related content covering a broad theme, where each cluster covers a single topic.
This content can consist of detailed in-depth articles or blog posts, which then become the subtopics of your main topic cluster.
Once you have worked out your buyer personas (so you can understand who you are creating content for, their needs and pain points, etc.), you can use content idea generation tools like AnswerThePublic.com to create content clusters around a central topic.
Use tools like AnswerThePublic.com to generate ideas for topic clusters.
A topic cluster, then, is an SEO strategy that focuses on topics, not keywords, and informs Google that there is a semantic relationship between your content
This relationship is formed by linking your topic clusters to and from a pillar page.
Pillar Pages
A pillar page is a web page that provides a high-level overview of a topic on a single page and hyperlinks to clusters of related content, or subtopics.
“Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth.
Pillar pages are longer than typical blog posts because they cover all aspects of the topic you’re trying to rank for but they aren’t as in-depth. That’s what cluster content is for.
You want to create a pillar page that answers questions about a particular topic, but leaves room for more detail in subsequent, related cluster content.”
Your Pillar page should link to each cluster page via the keyword that best represents the focus of that cluster and each cluster page should link back to the pillar page using the same keyword that represents the focus of the pillar page.
This way, when one page in the cluster performs well, the entire topic cluster gets a boost.
Articles and blog posts covering subtopics can link to additional subtopics via other articles and posts to expand further on the content and create a comprehensive, detailed, and authoritative topic cluster.
With the Topic Cluster model, then, your content SEO strategy should be to link your website to the pillar page(s) of your topic clusters, allowing users and search engines access to an organized structure of interlinked related content.
Focusing your content strategy on topic clusters instead of individual keywords can help your site rank higher on search engines.
The video below provides a very brief overview of topic clusters:
The video below provides a practical tutorial on how to create effective topic clusters and pillar pages.
This video provides great examples of creating pillar pages and keyword content clusters:
And, if you want to get more in-depth into the topic, this hour-long video shows you how to group keywords and build topic clusters at scale:
For more information on creating pillar pages (with examples and templates), see the “References” section of this lesson.
Silos
It’s worth noting that many experts advocate using SEO siloing over topic clustering for your content SEO, while other experts say that siloing makes no sense.
While both SEO Siloing and Cluster Content architecture have a similar aim to organize your site and make it easier for visitors and search engines to understand your content by following a central theme from a higher-level topic overview down to ever more in-depth related topics and subtopics, there are some key differences.
In silo architecture, for example, content is organized into a hierarchy where the content is divided into clear, distinct categories that flow from top to bottom (i.e., from general information pages to specific information pages) much like a chapter in a book, where the silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site and it doesn’t cross-link to other silos.
Silo architecture also requires a lot more planning in advance of building a website than cluster content architecture.
It requires a multistep process of planning and implementation where the website theme first has to be clearly determined, then the theme is built using either physical or virtual silos, and then expert-quality content is created for each of the theme’s silos using relevant, targeted keyword-rich phrases.
While this lesson focuses on how to improve your content’s SEO, it’s important not to ignore the technical aspects of SEO, as these can hurt your rankings even if your content is perfectly optimized.
For this reason, we recommend making sure that all areas of SEO are covered.
SEO Site Audit
Google provides a whole range of tools and reports to help you fix technical SEO issues. Learn more about Google’s Tools and Reports.
Follow the recommended steps below to run an SEO audit and ensure that your rankings will not be affected by technical SEO problems:
Google Search Console. Check the Index Coverage report and fix any errors that are causing indexing issues. Also, check for Manual Actions that need addressing, Security Issues that need fixing, or pages that are not passing Google’s Core Web Vitals. Look for opportunities to improve these pages.
Check Your Site’s Mobile Friendliness. Google uses the mobile version of your website to determine where to rank you (mobile-first indexing). If using WordPress, make sure to use a mobile-responsive theme and that all plugins load and display correctly on mobile devices. Use Google’s Mobile Usability Tools And Reports.
XML sitemap – Make sure your sitemap is configured correctly and can be found in Google Search Console.
Check your site’s page loading speed. Use a tool like GTMetrix to analyze your page loading speed and detect issues. Remove any unnecessary scripts or plugins that are slowing down your website. If your site runs on WordPress, use a free speed optimization and caching plugin like Hummingbird and an image compression plugin like Smush to further reduce your site’s page loading speed and serve pages faster.
HTTPS – Make sure you have set up https:// correctly. If required, set up redirects to ensure that all http:// pages redirect to their https:// equivalent.
robots.txt file – Check to ensure that crawlers aren’t blocked from accessing any pages by mistake.
Identify and remove thin or duplicate content. If your site contains multiple versions of a page, use canonical tags to specify which page should be prioritized.
Run regular site audits (e.g. 2-4 times per year) to check for issues that can affect your rankings.
Content SEO – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content SEO:
What is Content SEO?
Content SEO refers to the process of optimizing web content so that it ranks highly in search engine results. It involves using techniques like keyword research, content creation, and content optimization to improve visibility.
Why is Content SEO important?
Content SEO is vital as it helps improve website visibility, drives organic traffic, and enhances user experience, leading to higher conversions.
Why is keyword research important for content SEO?
Keyword research helps identify the terms and phrases that potential customers are searching for. By integrating these keywords into your content, you can make your web pages more relevant and visible to those users.
How can I optimize content for SEO?
Optimize content by conducting keyword research, creating high-quality, relevant content, optimizing meta tags, headers, and images, and focusing on user intent.
What are some SEO best practices for content creation?
SEO best practices include using relevant keywords appropriately, creating high-quality and engaging content, optimizing meta tags and descriptions, and ensuring your website has a responsive design and fast loading times.
How does Google rank content?
Google ranks content based on factors such as relevance to the search query, the quality of the content, user engagement with the site, and how well the website performs technically (like page speed and mobile-friendliness).
What are some common mistakes in content SEO?
Common mistakes include keyword stuffing, ignoring user intent, neglecting mobile optimization, and neglecting to update and repurpose content.
How long does it take to see results from content SEO efforts?
Results vary based on factors like competition, keyword difficulty, and content quality. Generally, significant improvements may take several weeks to months.
Is it necessary to update content regularly for SEO?
Yes, updating content regularly signals freshness to search engines, improves relevance, and can positively impact rankings.
Can FAQs be used to improve my website’s SEO ranking?
Yes, incorporating a well-structured FAQ section can help improve SEO rankings by providing targeted content that answers specific questions. This can increase the likelihood of appearing in featured snippets and directly addressing user queries.
How can I use FAQs for SEO and content marketing?
FAQs can be used to directly address common questions your audience may have. By incorporating relevant keywords and providing valuable answers, FAQs can enhance your site’s SEO, attract more traffic, and demonstrate your expertise.
Summary
Content management plays an important role in search engine optimization.
Understanding SEO best practices and adhering to Google’s content quality guidelines will ensure that your content is made easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand, resulting in improved rankings, more web traffic, and a better user experience overall.
It’s also important to have an overall content SEO strategy in place and a plan to follow. Different SEO models include keyword-based content writing, cluster content architecture, and SEO siloing.
Action Steps
Familiarize yourself with general SEO guidelines for creating quality content and pay careful attention to areas that can impact your content’s SEO like E-A-T, meta tags, and schema markups.
Chose an SEO blueprint for your content strategy. With this site, for example, we use a model for creating our training modules and lessons that more closely resembles using topic clusters than keyword-based articles or silos.
Use the tools referred to in this lesson to find additional ways to make your content more authoritative and appealing to search engines, such as using sitemaps, improving your internal linking, and using LSI and long-tail keywords to help rank your content higher.
Be proactive with your SEO. For example, ask other websites to link to your content using an email outreach template.
Resources
Google
Refer to the sections below for information on how to create better-quality content as per Google’s content quality guidelines and documentation
Search Console User Guide & Training – Learn how to use Google’s SEO tool to better understand how your website is performing on Google Search and to learn ways to improve your search performance to drive more relevant traffic to your business.
Focus on content – Advice from Google on how to ensure that your site is offering the best content it can.
General Guidelines -Helpful guidelines and best practices for getting the best results in Google. Although this section is not specifically content-related, it includes useful information like avoiding duplicate content.
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines – This comprehensive downloadable PDF guide provides the criteria used by raters (i.e. people who provide Google with insights on whether its algorithms are working to rank quality content in the search results).
Google’s Visual Elements Guide – Learn about the most common types of search result visual elements found on Google Search results pages.
Spam Policies For Google Web Search – A useful guide to spam policies that Google implements to help protect users and improve the quality of its search results.
Learn everything you need to know about SEO – for beginners to advanced users:
Beginner’s Guide To SEO – This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.
SEO Learning Center – A self-paced learning center about search engine optimization.
SEO Resources – Use this extensive database of free whitepapers, reports, guides, webinars, and case studies to take your SEO strategy to the next level.
Schema.org
Schema.org is a joint effort supported by top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema. Schema.org provides a single place to learn about schema markup and defines hundreds of item types and properties that are most valuable to search engines.
Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.
Content Tools & Resources
Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.
On this resources page, you will find a comprehensive collection of tools and resources for creating, promoting, and managing your content effectively.
Whether you are a marketer, blogger, content creator, business owner, seasoned content creator, or just starting out, these resources will help you streamline your content creation process, reach a wider audience, and take your content to the next level.
We have compiled below a comprehensive (and growing) list of useful, time-saving, cost-effective, and essential tools and resources that will help you be more productive in the areas of digital content planning, content production, content marketing, and content management.
Most of the tools and resources recommended below are free, and some are paid. Hopefully, you will find these to be invaluable, helpful, and worth knowing about.
Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.
File Transfer Tools
Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.
Sending and receiving files to and from other users, transferring files between different devices, and uploading or downloading files or media from various computer devices to your website, server, or remote storage services are all essential aspects of managing your content effectively.
In other lessons, we’ve looked at setting up effective content storage systems and documenting these processes to manage your organization’s files, media, and content.
If you need help in those areas, refer to the following lessons:
In this lesson, we look at various file transfer tools and methods you can use to get your content and files quickly and easily to other users, devices, web servers, and cloud storage services.
We’ll cover:
Essential File Transfer Tools
Transferring Files To Your Server Or Remote Storage
Uploading Files To Your Website From Different Locations
Using CMS Features To Upload Files To Your Website
Being able to transfer files quickly and easily to other users is essential for areas like content production, so it’s important to organize your content management systems around tools like:
Email (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.)
Mobile Devices
Team Communication Tools (e.g. Zoom, Slack, etc.)
Email
You already know that you can send files via email as an attachment.
You can send files via email as an attachment…
But…did you know that with certain applications like Gmail, you can also send your files via email securely?
Gmail also lets you send files over email securely using Confidential mode.
For example, Gmail offers a confidential mode that prevents your email recipients from forwarding, copying, printing, or downloading either the message or its attachments. This helps you protect sensitive information from being shared accidentally or without your consent.
Watch the video below for more information about this feature:
With Gmail, you can also insert a file from Google Drive as an attachment (we cover Google Drive further down)…
Use Gmail and Google Drive to upload, store, and send files online to other users.
Mobile Devices
Mobile devices are another great tool for sending media files like images, videos, audio recordings, notes, etc.
See the ‘References’ section at the end of this lesson for links to excellent articles covering different methods you can use to transfer files using your mobile devices.
Team Collaboration Tools
Applications like Slack, Zoom, and many other tools have built-in features for sharing files, so your team can use these to quickly send files to different team members and across to other users and departments.
For example, Slack lets you upload files like documents, videos, artwork, etc. from your computer and shared drives and share these with your team.
Use Slack’s built-in features to upload and share files with your team.
Zoom also lets you upload and share file attachments, as the video below shows.
Transferring Files Between Your Computer And Your Web Server
Managing content effectively often requires uploading (and downloading) files between your computer or other devices and your web server.
Two popular methods used for transferring files between computers and web servers are:
Using a Desktop FTP client
Using a webhosting control panel application (e.g. cPanel’s File Manager.)
We’ll look at using these methods below, as they don’t require you to have advanced technical skills like other file transfer methods (e.g. SSH).
Follow the tutorials and the links provided below to learn how to use an FTP tool and File Manager to transfer files from your computer to your web server.
Always back up your website (files and data) before modifying any files on your server.
Desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
This section explains how to set up a desktop-based FTP application to transfer files directly from your computer or laptop.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an outdated way of sharing files and most web browsers no longer support it, as it is no longer considered to be secure.
Browser FTP was once popular but most web browsers no longer support it.
Using SFTP or FTPS (and HTTPS) instead of FTP is highly recommended.
The most reliable alternative to browser FTP is a dedicated FTP/SFTP client installed on your computer, like Filezilla
Setting Up A Desktop FTP Client – How To FTP/SFTP Files To Your Server Using Filezilla
Filezilla is a popular free desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. It is open-source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Transferring files using a desktop FTP application like Filezilla is all done via the tool’s interface.
Filezilla interface
Filezilla’s interface looks complicated, but it’s really not. After connecting to your server, all you basically do is select files from a folder in your computer or hard drive (left panel) and drag these across to a folder on your server (right panel) and the tool will automatically begin to upload your files.
Similarly, you can download files by selecting and dragging these from a folder on your server (right panel) to a folder on your computer or hard drive (left panel).
Filezilla provides a basic tutorial on its site. If you need more help using Filezilla, see this video course for beginners: How To Use FTP
When using FileZilla, we recommend selecting the SFTP- SSH File Transfer Protocol for transferring files from your computer to your server securely.
Click on the General tab and select SFTP File Transfer Protocol.
Transferring Files Using cPanel’s File Manager: Step-By-Step Tutorial
Let’s show you how to use cPanel’s File Manager to upload files from your computer or external hard drive to your web server.
We’ll go through a step-by-step example on how to upload and extract a zipped file.
Note: Make sure your hosting uses cPanel for this tutorial. Otherwise, check with your hosting company to see what file transfer tools they provide.
First, log into cPanel…
cPanel’s login screen.
File Manager is located in the Tools > Files section of your cPanel administration screen.
Click on File Manager…
cPanel: Files – File Manager
Your server files will be visible inside the File Manager screen.
The File Manager screen.
Some of the main functions you will use inside File Manager to perform file transfer operations include:
Move File – allows you to select files and move them into another directory. This feature is useful if you upload files to the wrong folder and want to move these to another folder location.
Upload – allows you to upload files directly to your server. This feature is useful when performing manual software updates, and restoring or reinstalling website files.
Download – allows you to download files from your server to your local machine. This feature is useful when performing manual backups.
Delete – allows you to delete selected folders and files on your server.
Extract – allows you to unzip files inside your server directories. This feature is useful for uploading folders or multiple files (covered below).
Compress – allows you to compress (zip) folders inside your server directories. This feature is useful for downloading entire folders, large files, etc.
cPanel’s File Manager allows you to perform a range of useful functions by clicking buttons.
Additionally, you will find useful Directory Navigation Menu Buttons inside the File Manager area, including:
Up One Level – Moves files up one level inside the folder.
Reload – Refreshes your screen.
Select All – Selects all files.
Unselect All – Unselects all files.
Use the buttons in the navigation menu to perform additional functions.
Using File Manager To Upload And Extract Zipped Files
In this example, we’ll show you how to upload and extract a zipped plugin file to your server.
First, make sure to have your zipped file ready for upload.
A zipped file ready to upload to the server.
Next, log into cPanel and open up the File Manager panel.
Log into cPanel’s File Manager.
You can drill down folder hierarchies to access nested folders and files by double-clicking on the upper directory folders.
Double-click folders to access nested folders and files
Next, locate the folder on your server where you will upload your file and click Upload.
In the screenshot below, we will upload the zipped plugin file into the plugins folder section of our WordPress site installation.
Click on the Upload button to upload your file to your server.
A new screen called ‘Upload files’ will open up in your web browser. You can drag and drop files into the section with the dotted border to automatically begin uploading your files, or click on the ‘Select File’ button as shown below, then locate and select your zipped file to upload.
Click the Select File button to select and upload your file.
Select your file and click ‘Open’ to begin uploading the file to your server …
Select your file and click the Open button to upload your file to your server.
File Manager will begin to upload your file to your server. Wait until the file has finished uploading.
Wait until your files have been uploaded…
Once your file has been uploaded, click on the “Go Back…” link to return to the folder inside your File Manager’s screen where you have uploaded the file to.
Your file has now been uploaded. Click on the link to return to the File Manager’s folder screen.
You should see the file you have uploaded inside the folder on your server.
If you cannot see the file, then do the following:
Check that you are in the correct folder, and
Click the Reload button to refresh the screen.
Click Reload to refresh the screen if you cannot see the file you have just uploaded.
Also, if you upload a file to the wrong directory, use the Move button to select the right destination folder for your file.
Have you uploaded a file to the wrong folder on your server? No problem, use the Move button to place it in the right folder.
After your zipped file has been uploaded, click on the ‘Extract’ button to decompress (unzip) your file.
Let’s extract this zipped file inside your server.
A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm the location where you want to extract your files to. Click Extract File(s) to continue.
Click Extract Files to confirm and begin unzipping your file.
The ‘Extraction Results’ window displays all of your extracted files once the operation has been completed.
Click Close to return to the File Manager screen.
All of your zipped files are now extracted. Go ahead and close the Extraction Results window.
Click the Reload button to refresh your screen.
Click Reload to refresh your screen.
All uploaded files are now extracted and added to your server.
Your newly uploaded file…fully extracted and ready for use!
You can delete the original zip file from your server to save space and keep your folder free of unnecessary clutter.
To delete the zipped file, select it in your File Manager screen and click on the Delete button.
Select the original zipped file and click the Delete button to remove the file from your server and save space.
The above method for uploading files to your server is useful. Large files that normally take a long time to upload via FTP can upload in seconds or just a few minutes when transferred using cPanel’s File Manager.
Not all hosting companies offer cPanel. Many hosting companies, however, offer a file manager application, so check with your web host.
How To Configure Server File Permission Settings
Most software program installations nowadays will configure everything automatically for you. Sometimes, however, you may need to manually set permissions to allow other users to read, write, modify, and/or access information after uploading some files or programs to your web server.
File permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your server files and folders or directories.
Server file permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your files.
This is important because some applications need to upload or access files in some of your server directories to perform certain functions. If permissions for these files or directories are not enabled or set correctly, it can cause errors.
Errors can occur if file permissions on server directories are not set correctly.
For example, if your site runs on WordPress and permissions have not been automatically set or enabled for files in your wp-content directory, you may experience errors when uploading plugins or you may not be able to save changes made to plugin settings.
Refer to the short tutorial below to learn how to configure server file permission settings for files and directories on an open-source operating system like Linux.
Again, we recommend doing a full backup of your website’s files and data before modifying any files on your server.
How To Configure File Permission Settings On Your Server (Linux)
CHMOD
Chmod (abbreviated from change mode) is a command that lets a user tell the system (or server) how much or how little access it should permit a file or a file directory to be given.
It changes the file system modes of files and directories, including permissions and special modes.
If you experience issues you may need to configure file permission settings on your server.
Setting File Permission Settings Using ‘CHMOD’
If you use an FTP program like Filezilla, do the following to view and change security permission settings for your server files and folders:
Access your server
Locate the directory or file with the permissions you want to change
Right-click on the file and select ‘Properties’
File Properties
The CHMOD options should display in the menu. If not, access the help section of your FTP client and search for chmod, permissions, or change mode. Most FTP programs have this feature readily available.
To change or set permissions for your files, simply check or uncheck the permission boxes (for Owner, Group, or Public), or add the desired permission setting number in the Manual display field, then click OK to save.
Setting CHMOD File Permissions
Common WordPress file and directory permissions include the following settings:
777 – Everything for everyone. This command gives read, write, and execute permission to the owner, group, and public. chmod 777 is considered potentially dangerous because you are giving read, write, and execute permission on a file/directory to everyone on your system. Normally, this setting should be avoided.
755 – Only the owner can write, read and execute for everyone. This command means that only the owner will be allowed to write to the file. The owner, group members, and everyone else will have read and execute permissions.
644 – Everyone can read, only the owner can write. With this setting, the owner will have read and write permissions while the group and everyone else has read permission only.
Setting directory permissions to make your files writable depends on your web hosting environment. For example, to make a file or directory writable, you would normally set (i.e. chmod) file permissions either to 777 or 755.
Notes:
Only change file permission settings if your site installation or plugin requires it. Normally, this will either be specified in a user manual (e.g. a plugin manual or installation guide) or if changing file permissions is required while performing some kind of function on your site (e.g. installing or making changes to plugins or themes).
If you are performing installations using wizards, a notification message will usually appear on your screen asking you to make a particular file or directory writable, or specifying which permission settings you need to change.
Unless the change required to the file permission settings is permanent, you would normally restore the file to its original settings after making and saving the change for security purposes (e.g. changing a file from 644 to 755, then back to 644 again). This prevents hackers and unauthorized users from accessing and modifying the files on your server.
After making changes to files, refresh your site’s page in your browser to make sure that everything is working correctly.
Changing file permissions is not complicated. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you are concerned that you might do something that can cause errors, don’t modify any files. Instead, ask your web hosting provider or someone with more knowledge or experience to do this for you.
If you experience errors after changing permission settings, change the permission settings back to what they were and see if the error messages disappear. If errors persist after restoring file permissions, contact your web hosting provider for help.
Use this handy chmod calculator if you need help configuring different file or directory permissions.
Amazon S3
If you are hosting media files (e.g. an image) on Amazon S3 (covered in the next section) and the file is not displaying correctly on your browser, you may not have set the correct permissions for that file.
Typically, this is what you will see if a file has incorrect permissions…
This is what you will see if you have not set the correct permissions for your file on Amazon S3.
To display images stored on Amazon S3 on your website’s pages, set your file permissions as shown below:
Set up your image file permission as shown here and click Apply Changes to display images stored on Amazon S3 to users on your website.
Full Control
Owner – Tick the checkbox
Any AWS Users – Leave the checkbox unticked
All Users – Leave the checkbox unticked
Read
Owner – Leave the checkbox unticked
Any AWS Users – Tick the checkbox
All Users – Tick the checkbox
After ticking the boxes as described above, click on Apply changes to set your file permissions.
The images should now display to your website users. The Amazon S3 section below shows you how to add media files from S3 to your web pages.
Transferring Files To Cloud Storage Services
Your website files can be stored on your web server or a cloud storage service.
Some of the most popular storage services for storing files remotely in the cloud include:
Amazon S3
Google Drive
Dropbox
Let’s take a brief look at each of these services and how to transfer cloud-hosted files to and from your devices and your website.
Amazon S3
Store your files remotely using Amazon S3’s cloud storage service.
Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) is a scalable cloud storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon S3 is great for storing all kinds of files, especially media files, website backups, data archives, and more.
Amazon S3 storage folders are called buckets.
With Amazon S3, you store your files in buckets (folders).
A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. You can store any number of objects in a bucket and can have up to 100 buckets in your account.
Many applications can connect directly with your Amazon S3 account, allowing you to quickly and easily upload and store files in your s3 buckets and serve these directly on your website.
For example, the image below is being hosted on Amazon S3.
This image of a cute puppy is hosted on Amazon S3.
To check this using Google’s Chrome browser, right-click on the image and choose Inspect.
Right-click on the image and select Inspect (Chrome browser users).
You should see an Amazon S3 bucket address displayed for the image.
This image is hosted on Amazon S3 as the Chrome Browser’s Inspect function shows.
Uploading files directly to Amazon buckets can be a little complicated, so we recommend using a tool like the one below to transfer files to and from your computer or hard drive and your Amazon S3 account…
S3 Browser
We recommend using a tool like S3 Browser to upload files to your S3 account.
S3 Browser is a free Windows client for Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network, (CDN). We use and recommend installing the paid version of this tool as S3 Browser is free for personal use only.
Also, as this site is built using WordPress, media files stored on Amazon S3 can be inserted directly into the content, so here’s what we did to display the image above on this web page:
First, we uploaded the image to our Amazon s3 account…
Image uploaded to S3 bucket.
After the image was uploaded, we then set file permissions as explained earlier, right-clicked on the file, and selected Generate Web URL…
Select Generate Web URL…
We then copied the URL of the image to our clipboard…
Click the button to copy the file URL to your clipboard.
And pasted the URL into the content…
Paste…done!
That’s it! When you look at that image on our web page, it’s being served from Amazon S3, not from our web server.
Remember to add an alt tag image and a caption to your image URL before publishing to improve your content SEO.
Easily add media files hosted on Amazon S3 to a WordPress site.
Amazon S3 also allows you to set up a “bucket policy” on your server that protects files stored in buckets from being hotlinked.
Google Drive lets you store files on Google’s servers in the cloud. You can also share files and synchronize files across different devices.
Google Drive is great for storing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, forms, and other files created using Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. It also lets you collaborate with your content team to edit your documents.
Files created and edited through the Google Docs suite are automatically saved in Google Drive. You can also upload large files (up to 750 GB in size), and change privacy settings for individual files and folders, including enabling sharing with other users or making your content public.
Tutorial: How To Embed Files From Google Drive Into Your Website
You can easily embed files from Google Drive into your website.
In this example, we’ll embed an image stored on Google Drive into a WordPress site.
Note: You can use the same method as shown in the tutorial below to embed other types of files into your site like videos, audios, etc.
After uploading your media file to Google Drive, right-click on the file and select Preview.
Right-click on your file and select Preview.
Next, click on the vertical ellipsis icon (More Options) and select Open in new window…
Select Open in new window.
Click on the vertical ellipsis icon again and select Embed item…
Select Embed item…
Copy the embed code to your clipboard…
Select and copy the embed code to your clipboard.
If you are using the WordPress classic editor, switch to the Text tab and paste the content from your clipboard into the location where you want your image (or video, or audio file, etc.) to display.
Paste the embed code into your content.
Your embedded file should display when you publish and preview your content.
The WordPress Media Library lets you upload all kinds of media files to your site and comes with many built-in features for managing your uploaded files.
You can use drag and drop or select files to upload media to your WordPress site.
In addition to the Media Library, there are various WordPress Media Plugins you can use to transfer and manage files on your site from your computer and cloud storage services.
For example, S3 Media Maestro lets you display videos hosted on Amazon S3 securely on your site.
Use S3 Media Maestro to display content stored on Amazon S3 securely on your WordPress site.
If you store files on Google Drive, you can use a plugin like Google Drive Embedder to add files to your content.
You can also use a plugin like Dropr to easily access files from your Dropbox account and add them to your WordPress website.
Dropr is a Dropbox plugin for WordPress.
For more plugins that can help you manage the transfer of files to your WordPress site, see this section: WordPress Media Plugins
WordPress Automatic Updates
WordPress has a built-in feature that automatically transfers data like new software updates, plugins, and themes from the main WordPress repository (WordPress.org) to the WordPress installation files in your server.
It also automatically uploads, extracts, and places all data directly into the correct folders inside your web server and database.
The WordPress auto-updating feature is useful for transferring files from your server when:
Updating WordPress via the dashboard
Uploading and installing WordPress plugins
Updating WordPress plugins
Uploading and installing WordPress themes
Updating WordPress themes
The ability to perform updates directly inside your WordPress dashboard is extremely convenient. However, keep the following in mind…
One-click updates work on most servers. If you have any problems, it is probably related to permissions issues on the filesystem.
See the section earlier on configuring server file permissions if you run into any issues with WordPress (also refer to this WordPress Troubleshooting Guide if you experience other errors on your site).
Zapier
Zapier lets you connect and integrate your web applications and automate your workflows.
Essentially, Zapier allows thousands of different applications to communicate with each other and create all kinds of “when this happens…automatically do this” tasks (called “Zaps”), saving you a lot of time in the process.
Zapier also offers many integrations with WordPress.
Zapier offers extensive help documentation, including detailed tutorials on how to integrate the tool with all kinds of services.
Video Courses For Beginners – Transferring Files
The video courses below cover basic areas of transferring files and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to set up and use Amazon S3 to upload, store, manage, and protect your site’s images, large media files, downloadable files, stream videos, and more.
Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.
Effective content management involves the continuous transfer of files between users, different devices, web servers, and remote storage services.
In this lesson, we have covered many different methods you can use to transfer files and share content in your organization.
Action Steps
Make an inventory of the file transfer tools, methods, and processes used in your organization and make sure there is workflow documentation for your content team on how to use these effectively.
Resources
WordPress User Manual – The most detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users available.
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Use the checklists and templates in this section to help improve your content team’s efficiency and productivity in areas like content strategy, content planning, content production, content promotion, and content management.
Documenting systems and processes in areas of your business like 
The most effective way to help your business realize its goals and objectives is to turn every content-related area of your business into systems that anyone in your organization can help to manage.
Content reviews are a vitally important part of effective content management.
Sometimes a content manager has to fix up things “on the fly” to get the content published and approved.
Content promotion is the process of distributing content through different channels to reach its intended audience.
Research from leading online sources shows that people are watching more videos online than ever before.
A successful email marketing strategy will help you grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers.
Your business has to share and promote its content using various channels to reach as many people in its target audience as it can.
Content marketing can help to create more exposure for your business online and drive more traffic to your website.
Google defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the process of making your site better for search engines.
On this resources page, you will find a comprehensive collection of tools and resources for creating, promoting, and managing your content effectively.
Sending and receiving files to and from other users, transferring files between different devices, and uploading or downloading files or media from various computer devices to your website, server, or remote storage services are all essential aspects of managing your content effectively.
