If you’re paying a freelance writer to create blog articles for you, and you want to make sure you’re getting bang for your buck, read on.
A blog article isn’t working effectively for you if it’s just a one-off, stand-alone marketing asset that withers and dies on your website.
Instead, your blog articles need to be repurposed and amplified to ensure you’re getting maximum mileage out of every article you commission.
Below I look at eight different ways to leverage and create a range of other marketing assets from your blog articles.
1. Use your blog article as newsletter content
Publishing a blog article on your website is all well and good, but once it’s there you need to let your customers and prospects know about it, because very few of them are just scrolling around your website looking for your latest missive. Featuring it in your next regular newsletter is an excellent way to do this, particularly if the blog article is educational-style content.
2. Use your blog article in an eDM
If you don’t want the article to get lost along with several others in a newsletter, or if you think it’s so good it’s worth drawing attention singularly to it, you could use it to create an electronic direct mail (eDM) – in other words, an email to your customer and prospect list inviting and enticing them to read it. You’ll need a clickable subject line and engaging email content to draw them in. The type of articles that usually work best in eDMs are linked to an offer, have an obvious sales component or have a strong ‘what’s in it for me’ benefit for the reader.
3. Create an infographic from your blog article
Consider whether the content in the article (or at least the main points) could be simplified and expressed pictorially as an infographic. It’s no secret that readers find graphics more compelling and visually appealing than text, and studies have found we are able to retain information more easily when it’s presented in a visual format. DIY graphic design platforms such as Canva have made it easier to create infographics in-house, so with minimal time and effort, you’ll have a completely new piece of marketing collateral derived from your blog article.
4. Create a video from your blog article
If you’re a follower of content trends you’ll know that video is one of the mediums of the moment. As with infographics, it benefits from an audience preference for images over words, and buy using in-house spokespeople on camera it allows your audience to get to know the people behind your brand a little better. To turn your blog article into a video you’ll simply need to rework the content into a script, while online video editing platforms have simplified the filming and editing process.
5. Post your blog article in full on social media
Whether your businesses preferred social media outlet is Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or a combination of these, any business that isn’t using social media to amplify its blog posts is missing a trick. While sending your blogs to customers or prospects on a mailing list via newsletters or eDMs is all well and good, linking to your blog article from a post on social media can help you reach another audience – potential customers that don’t even know you exist. Thanks to the algorithms that run in the background of social media sites, users are constantly being recommended posts they might like from companies they don’t follow, based on their usage habits. Adding hashtags to your post drawing on the key topics from your article can also help your post get in front of more eyeballs via in-social search.
6. Extract quotes or key points from your blog article to create new social posts
Aside from linking to your entire blog article from a social post as discussed above, you can make the blog work harder by breaking up the article and republishing it in small bites on social media, all the while linking back to the original article hosted on your website. The key here is to have a time lag between your original post and those snippet posts, so that you don’t come across as repetitive. With a list-based article such as this one, it can be as easy as posting each of these eight tips to social media individually, with a short intro and link back to this article, but you can also look at pulling out key points or quotes and posting those individually.
7. Develop your blog article into longer format content
If you’ve hit a upon a good, meaty blog topic, consider whether there is more to say on it. Unless the blog article has been created solely for SEO purposes there’s a good chance its less than 800 words long, so ask yourself whether it could be used as a jumping-off point for a longer format piece of content such as a whitepaper, ebook or even a podcast.
8. Refresh and republish your blog article in full
Creating content doesn’t always have to be about reinventing the wheel. If you’ve already got great content that is fairly timeless (rather than based on topical news or a current issue), there’s nothing wrong with reviewing it after a year, polishing it up, giving it a fresh headline and republishing it again. If you’re worried readers will spot the re-use rest assured that it’s fairly unlikely – while you may wish they were, your customers or prospects aren’t paying as much attention to your content as you are.
You don’t have to do it alone
If you’d like to maximise your blog articles but you’re not sure where to begin, or don’t have the time to spend considering their reuse or creating additional marketing collateral from them, your freelance writer should be able to help.
Not only do I use this approach in my own business marketing, I’ve re-worked and re-invented blog articles I’ve written for a number of my clients, whether I wrote the original article or not.
Contact me if you’d like me to do the same for your business.