“My entire goal is to give more valuable, helpful, and remarkable content.”
Ann Handley
Like Marketing Profs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley, those of us in the content field try our best to make sure we write original, useful content. Sometimes we get it right. The social shares start adding up, the clicks grow, and the traffic steadily rolls in.
But sometimes, our content bombs.
We write it, invest in it, put it out there, and….nothing. Not enough social attention, not enough clicks.
So what do you do when it happens to you?
I’ve documented the steps we take to try to rejuvenate our own lifeless content. I hope it helps you too.
- We change the headline
Often a sucky headline can be enough to put off readers from checking out a post. Livening up a headline might be all your need to wake up interest in your post. If you don’t want to change the URL, you can still play with your social media headlines, especially if you are using a WordPress social media plugin like Yoast, or a social media automation tool like OktoPost or Buffer.
Check out these tools to ramp up your headline
http://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator
http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker
- We change the sharing image
If your headline looks pretty decent but you still aren’t getting any views try changing the images you are sharing it with. Sharing a post without an image at all might decrease your post’s success, but using a great image doesn’t need to be super expensive.
Check out these great tools for adding images to your content
- We think out of the box about social promotion
Maybe we used the wrong hashtags for our target audience? It might be worth trying different hashtags out when you tweet out your content to get more attention.
Maybe we put all our efforts into Facebook promotion, but we didn’t think about Quora, where people were looking has questions that we had answered.
In general- it is worth investigating if any of these sites might be a good fit for promoting your content.
- We edit it with fresh eyes
If a post is still getting zero attention, and we’ve changed the headline and the image, reshared it to more appropriate social channels and numbers are still less than sluggish then we often re-edit it with a fresh pair of eyes.
Sometimes when we write content we can get pretty attached it to it, so it can be hard to let somebody else’s pen or computer come near it, but often a fresh edit can add that special something to a post that was previously pretty dull.
If you are the only writer for your business but you feel like your writing needs an edit you can check out these sites:
- We re-purpose it
Re purposing content is a great option for adding value to your popular content, but it is also a valuable idea for your less popular content too. A different format might breathe new life into old content.
Here are some options for re-purposing unpopular content:
- boring case studies into testimonials for banners or email marketing campaigns
- product feature reviews into product pages or sent to product review sites
- unpopular list posts can be re-purposed into a SlideShare presentation
- short how-tos can be compiled into longer, more valuable e-books
What do you do when your content bombs? We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: What To Do When Your Content Bombs
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