17 No-Cost Ways Writers Can Extend Reach of Their Editorial

17 No-Cost Ways Writers Can Extend Reach of Their Editorial

How do you know what your best content is? Include links to your best posts within blog posts Have great posts you want to share more widely? Here is an example from Lisa’s email that includes a post that she has written as well as a list of our top posts from 2016. Republish content This next set of tips extends the reach of some of your best content by publishing it again. Share your best content with your team to see if there are additional opportunities I also send monthly editorial updates to the team using this process and template. You have to create content to promote existing content?” Social media has historically been used for sending traffic to your blog, but a relatively new trend is people reading your content on social media itself. For example, we tweet a title and the blog post link as text and include an image with an interesting quote from the post, too. A link to the corresponding blog post or report is included with each of the images. Leverage Our third social media tactic for sharing content is not sharing our content but more supporting our community’s content. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team.

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extend-reach-editorial

On LinkedIn, a writer recently lamented:

The frustrating thing is, time spent on (promotion) strategies would detract from time spent doing my job, writing content for my clients. It feels like we are focusing more on the pot of gold, not the rainbow.

As a writer, do you feel the same way?

My take is that organizations need to look at how the team as a whole is spending its time to make sure there is ample time to promote. And the person who commented on LinkedIn is also right that writers need to spend most of their time writing. But, there are things writers and editors can do to extend the reach of the content they have spent so much time and passion creating.

In fact, this was the focus of a recent internal lunch-and-learn presentation that CMI Community Manager Monina Wagner and I put together. The tips were helpful to the companywide UBM team, and we wanted to share them here as well.

These ideas aren’t meant to be comprehensive of everything an organization can do to extend its reach. Rather, these are all things writers can do on their own or with the help of another team member (such as a designer or web person). We did not talk about things like email or paid promotions, which are valid ways to extend your reach as well.

The list below is practical – and, perhaps even better, everything on this list does not require any budget asks.

One additional note before we dig in:

This tip – as well as many of the others below – is about extending the reach of your best content. How do you know what your best content is? You can read about the key reports and the process I follow in Google Analytics to determine what content we want to prioritize for sharing. And, if you want to get yourself even more organized, use these insights to come up with your content essentials checklist.

Ideas using existing website traffic

We all spend so much time on our websites with the production of new content, it only makes sense to get as much from that time – and traffic – as possible. This first set of ideas covers how to do just that.

Click to Tweet is a snippet of text called out in your blog post that someone can easily click and tweet (as that name aptly implies). An example:

click-to-tweet-example

We’ve been using Clicks to Tweet in our blog posts for the past 18 to 24 months and have loved the results. As a writer, I anecdotally see my posts being shared on Twitter with those Click to Tweet statements.

SUGGESTIONS:

  • Consider how many tweets you want to use per post. We typically include two to four.
  • Keep the Click to Tweet text to approximately 110 characters to provide ample space for the URL as well as retweets.
  • Include relevant hashtags and Twitter handles of authors as well as those mentioned in the text.
  • Review the stats from your Clicks to Tweet to see what is being shared. For instance, we find that tweets with stats and short, impact statements do best. Often, the first Click to Tweet in a post does well.

TOOL SUGGESTION: We use Better Click to Tweet, but there are several options available.

Include links to your best posts within blog posts

Have great posts you want to share more widely? Include them in your new posts. We have tried various formats, and here are two that work well.

Our “handpicked related content” callout simply includes a link to one or more related pieces of content, as you can see in this image:

handpicked-recommended-content-example

Like all blogs, we embed links within our posts to related content. Our general rule of thumb is to only include links that provide additional information to a reader when it would be helpful. We do not want to include a link simply for the sake of adding a backlink.

TOOL SUGGESTION: Wondering what is working well? Use your web analytics tool so you can see what people are clicking and what format works well. I love Google Analytics Chrome extension that lets me see what internal links are being clicked on any page in our website. This example comes from a recent post I created:

google-in-page-analytics-clicks

Add links to your best posts from older, high-traffic posts and pages

While adding links to great posts as you continue to publish may be somewhat obvious, remember that you can add links to older posts as well.

Andy Crestodina shared that Orbit Media always adds a link to a new post from an old post as part of the publication process. This is a fantastic idea!

Even if you don’t go that far, consider how you can get traffic to your best content. For instance, whenever we publish an e-book, the author sends a list of updates for our web person to make, including updated links and existing articles, as well as updated calls to action on related posts. For instance, here is a snippet from an email that covers some of the changes to make when we published a new influencer marketing e-book.

cta-option-list-example

Have a popular-post widget on your site

Another simple thing to include on your website is a popular-post widget that makes it easy for readers to browse your best posts. If you work with outside writers, this is also a great place to point people when they want to see some examples.

TOOL SUGGESTION: The popular-post widget we use is WP Tab Widget by MyThemeShop.

Organize your posts by category and topic

Another thing you can do to organically extend the reach of your content is to make sure you have a taxonomy in place, which often manifests itself as your website categories and tags.

This is a work in progress at CMI, and we are doing a lot of work on the back end that is not yet visible. The goal is to help our readers surface related content through breadcrumb trails or other pages – and extend the reach of what we have.

While this conversation could easily be a post in and of itself, if you are starting down this path, figure out five to seven key topic areas your editorial covers. It’s ideal if these areas don’t overlap. While this is not yet visible on our site, we are using the following categories to organize our content:

  • High-level strategy
  • Editorial process and teams
  • Content creation
  • Distribution and promotion
  • Measurement and reporting
  • Trends and research
  • General success tips

These topics cover the steps of the content marketing process plus two non-process categories. As such, these categories also serve as an additional checkpoint to make sure we are covering the topics that stay true to our editorial (i.e., if a topic doesn’t fit into one of these categories, then why are we covering it?)

Editorial outreach

Lisa Dougherty, who manages our blog, is a master of personal outreach. Each of the following ideas is taken directly from how she works with authors – those mentioned in our posts, as well as team members.

Send blog post previews to your authors

Lisa sends previews of upcoming articles to our blog authors approximately one week before scheduled publication. Not only does this give authors time to make last-minute corrections if needed, but it also gives them easy ways to share their posts. Below is an example :

post-email-preview-example

Lisa also follows up with each author after the first comment on the blog as a reminder when the post is live – and the author can easily refer to this message for sharing ideas.

TOOL SUGGESTION: Lisa uses Outlook’s Quick Parts to make templates for emails that are sent repeatedly. Google Mail has a Lab that has a similar functionality called Canned Responses. Both tools can be customized easily.

Email previews for roundup posts or mentions

Occasionally we run roundup posts with input from influencers (who are helpful for promotion, by the way). Lisa sends an email about a week in advance with the publish date, the URL, and pre-written tweets so it’s easy to share and schedule in advance as you can see in the example:

roundup-email-example

You also could send this after the piece is published. See what works best for you and your authors.

Celebrate your top bloggers

If you have contributors to your blog or other content, you can extend the reach by celebrating your top authors after their posts have been published. While we no longer do this, we used to have a top blogger badge we shared with our top authors each month as you can see in the…

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