Content is the lifeblood of your website. And your social media, newsletters, and really anything related to your brand. With all the various stakeholders involved, tackling a global content strategy can feel like a monumental task. Creating and sticking to a content lifecycle strategy will help to ensure your best content is optimized, showcased, and tracked for viability.
Strategize
Like your SEO, social media, or mobile strategy, the content lifecycle begins with planning. Analyze what content you have live right now, and consider where you want to be in 3 months, in a year, in three years. The latter probably won’t be spot on, as new technology and developments will require you to adapt along the way, but knowing where you want to be before the wrenches get thrown into the gears will help you to straighten everything out and get back on the right path.
Define your budget, time commitment, target audience, and have a solid idea of your company’s brand before you move on to the next step. While it’s tempting to skip the strategy step to save time, but chances are it will cost you both time and money in the long run.
Create
Once you figure out what kind and how much content you’re going to need, it’s time for your content creators to get creating. Whether it be an in-house writer, freelancer, or guest blogger, use your content strategy to create a topic plan and go to it! Providing fresh, relevant, high-quality content is the best way to boost your ranking on search engine results pages as well as establish yourself as a thought leader in your field.
A good rule of thumb is, the person who creates the content should not be the only person who edits it and should not be the person who gives it the final approval, although both of those steps are crucial as well to good content.
Measure and Review
Once content is live, that’s not the end of its story. The best measure to whether or not its good content is if people are visiting, staying on, and sharing the page. Common landing pages or high trafficked pages, like our Orlando Magic Wallpaper posts, should be reviewed often to make sure they’re in tip-top shape. Aim to do this at least every quarter and more often than that if you can.
Any time your company goes through a rebrand is an excellent time to review and make sure that the content on your site is still in line with the current brand. Also, how your company approaches different strategies and topics is bound to change over time with new technological developments and releases. Read over the content to make sure it’s still relevant and useful considering the current technological and strategic developments.
Adjust
Chances are, if you found issues with your content, so have your readers. Taking the time to change outdated content will do wonders in terms of keeping your website up-to-date. If content is unsavable because the information is way too outdated, it now contradicts your current brand, or it hasn’t received any visitors in a long, long time, get rid of it. Just make sure that you put a redirect in place for the URL in case someone saved it–you don’t want them going to a dead page after all.
Trim the fat by keeping only the content that is high quality and useful. Your readers will thank you for it.
The review and adjustment process is an on going task for us considering how fast developments occur in our industry. In fact, we’re in the process of reviewing and adjusting our content now. If you have questions on how to get started, give us a call and we can give you more specific recommendations based on your situation.
