Content marketing is one of the most effective and efficient ways to promote your brand in today’s web-centered market. However, content marketing is no easy undertaking. In fact, one of the many reasons that more companies aren’t utilizing content marketing is because it is so difficult and time consuming.
So what do you do if you want the results with content marketing, but you don’t want to put in all of the time, energy and effort?
Here is a founder’s guide to becoming a great content marketer that can help you achieve those results with far less effort than you would assume.
Use Tools to Help You Get Organized
One of the many things that makes content marketing so challenging is that it is time-consuming. However, there are ways to make the most of your time and to make sure your efforts are faster and more efficient.
There are several tools out there that can really help save you time and keep your organized.
Hootsuite is one popular tools that lets you schedule your social media posts and monitor your company’s mentions across different social media sites so you always know what is trending and going on in your industry.
Trello is another great tool that lets you work together with your team, or on your own, to plan out new topics.
The more apps and programs you can use to cut down on the man hours involved with content marketing, the more results you are going to see with minimal effort.
Outsource
A simple and effective way to be a great content marketer without all of the extra effort is to start outsourcing. If you don’t want put in the effort—then don’t, hire other people to do it.
Hire editors, writers and social media managers to do the work. This is a great way to make sure that you aren’t slowing down your efforts and to get the results you need. It is a simple and effective way to get the results without the work and chances are by hiring experts, you are going to see better results anyway.
Reuse and Repurpose
Constantly creating new content can seem like a great idea, but if you are a busy entrepeneur, then this can seem like more work than you have time for. In all reality, making new content is both time-consuming and expensive.
While you can’t completely abandon the idea of making new content, you can start reusing and recycling the content that you do have.
This doesn’t mean reposting the same things over and over again. It means doing things like taking old blog posts and turning them into e-books or other products for your customers. It can also mean rewriting the content you have and putting a new spin or title on it.
Some writers have success in taking portions of old content, fleshing them out and making them more in-depth pieces on a specific topic.
An even easier way to reuse and repurpose? Share your old content with new fans and followers. It is extremely easy and can actually deliver some pretty great results.
Write Longer Posts
Writing long form content may seem impossible for most people, but if you spend the time to make your pieces longer, you won’t need to write as many articles.
When you think about it, it is going to be easier to add 300 words to an article you are already writing, or is it going to be easier to come up with a new topic, write an additional article of 600+ words, do all the links, then publish it?
If you make several pieces of long-form content of 1000 words or more it won’t just bring more value to your readers, but it will improve your search rankings and help promote more traffic.
Just because you tend to slack on a few things here and there, it doesn’t mean that you still can’t see some outstanding results with content marketing.
Chances are, content marketing isn’t as difficult as you think and doesn’t require as much work as you imagine. Keep these tips in mind and push yourself to give content marketing a try, you may be surprised by how easy it can be.