How to Generate Plenty of Content Without Getting Overwhelmed.
Regardless of whether you are working on inbound marketing, customer service, or just building your personal brand, creating content is a critical factor. But there is no doubt it can be a huge time sink.
Having a few systems or processes in place to organize and facilitate your content production can help keep content from taking over your world. Here are a few ideas you can use.
Hub & Spoke
The Hub and Spoke is a model for how you organize and distribute your content. The hub is a central location, usually your website, where you post most of your informational content.
Facing out from your hub, like spokes on a wheel, are your social media channels. This is where you engage your potential audience and draw them back to your hub.
This sets up some clear parameters for your content activities in the two places. The hub is analogous to your home. Social media is like a giant cocktail party. You mingle on social media, meet new people, tell interesting stories, find common areas of interest with others, talk a bit about what you do, introduce people who may not know each other (but you think should).
If you decide you want a deeper relationship with someone you meet, maybe you invite them back home to get to know them better.
Social Listening
Social listening is one of the most overlooked uses of social media channels. We have not only a direct line of communication with our customers and prospects, but we have a direct line of sight into their thoughts… a direct line of insight, if you will.
Almost every social media platform includes a search function. By regularly performing searches of keywords and hashtags related to your business, industry and customer groups, you can collect a deep set of data on your customers’ and prospects’ concerns, questions, problems and even the things they delight in.
You can jump into the conversation to head off problems before they develop further (yes, that’s content). But you can also mine that data for content ideas. Every question can become a helpful, insightful post on your website or an infographic you can share on your own social media channels. That successful social conversation where you solved a problem or resolved an issue for a customer can become a case-study.
Every interesting thought leader or successful practitioner in your space that you discover could become a valued guest on a podcast. The more you listen, the less time you have to spend wracking your own brain for content ideas.
Pillar & Filler
Pillar & Filler is a model or strategy to help you create lots of meaningful content without stressing out too much over it. First, you need to come up with 3-5 overarching topics that are going to be the focus of your site’s posts. Then you need to decide what your publishing cycle is going to be. For an easy example, let’s say you have 3 key topics and you plan on a weekly cycle.
So, for each of these three topics, you want to publish one piece of Pillar Content per cycle. Pillar content is long-form, meaty content. What long-form is to you is also a matter of preference. Let’s say 1000-2500 words for this example. So, each week you are going to create one long article for each of your three topics. Let’s say you publish one on Monday, one Wednesday and one Friday.
Next, each day you want to produce 1-3 pieces of Filler content on each of your three topics. Filler content is shorter, snappier content. “3 tips for____,” or “Something to consider before ___.” You could share your insights on a thought-provoking article someone else has written about one of the topics or a review of a relevant book. You could use it to ask questions of your audience (questions you found through social listening, perhaps). You can pull excerpts from upcoming (or past) Pillar posts and simply post them or add additional thoughts about them. You can take additional relevant information that didn’t make it into the Pillar post. You could take those excerpts and extras and create infographics.
The end result here is that you have three solid, meaningful pieces of content on the key topics for your site that your reader (and search engines) can chew on, and 5-15 pieces of lighter, punchier fare for them to cleanse their palate with. This way there is always a reason for them to keep coming back to your site. You also now have 8-18 pieces of original content to share on your social channels per cycle.
There is no right answer for how many topics you cover or how long your cycle is. You could do four topics with a one-month cycle, or 2 topics with a daily cycle. The oversimplified answer is, the more good content you can create the better. The real answer is that you have to find that point of balance between volume, quality and your own ability to keep up with the schedule.
Experiment with the elements until you find a balance that works for you. Consistency is the holy grail you’re looking for. Whatever the volume is of quality content that you can consistently produce is the right answer for you.
70/20/10
Now that you have a system in place for creating quality content on your hub, it’s time to get social. The 70/20/10 rule is a model that will allow you to get really active on social media without losing yourself in the time sink that is the Internet.
There are multiple versions of this “rule” floating around out there. The one that seems most prevalent is one put out recently by Coca-Cola. Their 70-20-10 breaks down as 70% branding content, 20% social interaction and 10% advertising/sales. This is definitely a way to go, and works well for a company that has a dedicated marketing staff and/or agency teams that can keep up with the production of that much original content.
But the original 70-20-10 rule that I came across dates back to early internet marketers in the late 00’s and early Teens. That breakdown is 70% social interaction and sharing, 20% original/branding content and 10% sales/self-promotion. If you are a lone actor or only have a small team, then this one can be much more manageable.
Of course, a key consideration is what you hope to accomplish with your social media activities. If your key goal is to increase brand awareness, then Coke’s breakdown works. If your goal is to build a community and make connections with prospects and customers, then the latter breakdown makes more sense, in my opinion. You can spend 15 minutes three times a day, and hit your 70% marker by simply asking/answering questions and liking/sharing/retweeting other’s posts.
If you’re using the Pillar and Filler model to create content, then your 20% original content should be easy enough. And the 10% self-promotion/sales stuff should be informed by your overall business goals.
There are tools out there that can help make this even more efficient. Tools like HootSuite or TweetDeck will allow you to create your social media posts all at once and schedule them to post whenever you want. So an hour’s work at the beginning of the day can take care of most of your social media posts for the whole day, if not week.
With these systems in place, you ought to be able to create a steady, replicable process for organizing and producing plenty of content, and engaging your audience via social media without getting overwhelmed.