Creating Content that Impacts

There are a few technical skills involved in publishing an article online and then driving engagement and enthusiasm with it.   

Far too often, I hear from business owners, artists, or entrepreneurs, who “tried blogging” or did “some” podcasting and all but gave up because they didn’t get the results they expected.

Come on folks, you should know better.  As founders and creative professionals, you know better than anyone that the Field of Dreams mantra of “If you build it, they will come,” isn’t remotely accurate.  So why are so many writing a blog post, recording a podcast, or publishing a YouTube video and then expecting the audience will just come?

It takes time to build an audience on your site or blog. It takes time to get subscribers and followers. Don’t give up because you don’t yet have them; instead be smart about leveraging what you create.

” There is a sophistication to HOW, WHEN, and WHERE you create content in the various platforms are not necessarily competitive with one another. Medium is not Tumblr, which is not Instagram, nor Facebook, nor Wix, nor WordPress. “

How Content Creation Affects Your Funding

We pushed an article months ago, exploring how this sophistication in content creation not only drives your audience, but can impact what potential investors think of your level of expertise.  An infographic then and there, shared again here, gave a bit of insight to how to plan what you do with content but didn’t give much depth on specific tactics to undertake.

Let’s do that.

So, you have a blog post…

Own your content. 

What we mean by that is that first and foremost, always write on a domain associated with your personal brand or business (well, almost always).

If you've not done that, go do it now, first.  Set up a website and get your content there.

You want Google and social media to appreciate that your domain, where *you* establish, create, and own value, is the host of your content.  This is true of anything…

• Launching a podcast?  Don’t just put it on Spotify or Anchor.  Host your shows and the content about them on YOUR SITE.  Everywhere else is a channel.
• Working in video?  For the love of John Logie Baird, don’t just host your video on YouTube or Vimeo!  Promote it by way of your site and use video sites as audiences.
• Writing?   You can write on LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Facebook, and more.  If you **only** write there, you’re limiting your audience, control, insight, and ownership of your content.  Why on earth would you do that??

Granted, I said almost anything.

Of course, some content might only be applicable to your LinkedIn profile and community.  A discussion in a Reddit thread might only warrant writing your opinion there.  An answer you want to write to a question, might only apply to that question being on Quora.

But when you can, why not take what you intend to put there and also create more content for your space?  Write and publish your perspective in an appropriate tone and *then* push a varied perspective to LinkedIn, Quora, or Reddit (with a link back to your broader thesis on your site).

Let’s get into specifics.  Having published something on your domain, where else should you go with it and what and how should you do so? 

Here’s a task list
Notice, I’m going to do something funny in here that might not make sense so let me explain it – with each task I’m encourage you undertake, I’m going to link TO where I’ve done exactly what, on behalf of THIS article, I’m encouraging that you do with yours. Play along and notice I’m doing what you should.

Twitter

• You should already have more than one Twitter profile.  You have one for yourself, another for your brand or business, and you could still have more related to your industry.  Create audiences on twitter with varied profiles related to what you’re doing.
• Use your favorite scheduling tool and schedule MANY tweets about your article.  MANY.  
  • The headline and link, of course
  • A quote from yourself
  • A quote you featured from someone else
  • Provocative thoughts
• Schedule out the sharing of your content on ALL of your Twitter profiles.  Schedule tweets more than once.  No one sits on Twitter and reads everything so you absolutely can (and should) tweet something more than once – so followers who didn’t see it previously might still see it.
• Here’s the trick: ALWAYS @tag others.  It gets their attention.   Tag people you quoted.  Tag someone who might have interest.  Tag a friend who might enjoy your article.  Heck, tag me, I’m @seobrien; you’ll see how I get informed of what you’ve tweeted.  Share this and tag me 🙂

LinkedIn

A few ways to appreciate LinkedIn so let’s break them down.

1. Your own profile, from which you can post something or write an article
2. Your business page, from which you can post something
3. A group be that one you created or one in which you belong, to which you can post something

Let me touch on writing an article in a moment.  First, let’s keep this simple and focus on just posting your article.

Write a blurb that’s compelling and interesting.  Tag (just like Twitter, @[someone’s name]) people associated with your article.  Add your link.  And post it in varied ways as YOURSELF, your BUSINESS, and in GROUPs.
Appreciate, you shouldn’t post the exact same thing in every context.

Should you instead write an article??  Considering you already have, on your site, it would be easy to recreate the article on LinkedIn would it not?

POST when it’s just something you want to share with your LinkedIn connections and followers.   Instead take the article you wrote and publish it AGAIN as an article on your personal profile IF it’s an article you forever want associated with your LinkedIn profile.

Note though, if you want to republish your article in full on LinkedIn, add a link in that article back to the original article written.  This is pretty important for some SEO reasons we’ll not get into here.  Just remember: when you republish an article somewhere else, link back to the original!

Here’s our post of this to a LinkedIn group, here our business page, and here as myself. And this is what the article looks like.

Medium

Speaking of republishing the article, Medium is a great place to do so.
Again, you want to make sure you link BACK to the original source; Medium makes it easy to do so.  

Start here: https://medium.com/p/import

Use that Import Feature to paste the web address of your original article and import the content into Medium.  This ensures that the article uses what’s called a “Canonical URL” (an SEO thing) and at the end of the the article will appear a link to the original.

It’s a great idea to do this because Medium is a wonderful site through which you can (and should) build a distinct audience of followers who want to read what you write. And it’s here that our reason for this article should become most clear – Medium, as an example, is a place where you can write and develop an audience; but why would you only do so there?  Create your wholly owned foundation of content, your portfolio, and then syndicate it to places like Medium.

Here’s this article on Medium.

Facebook

Luckily, as we move forward in our list, we can get more concise.  Facebook: your personal profile, your business page, and groups.  A lot like LinkedIn. 
And, like Twitter and LinkedIn, be sure to tag people!

Post that you wrote this article yourself to share it with friends.  Post differently on your business or brand page that the company has shared this perspective (and tag yourself as the author!).  Post a few times in different Groups related to your topic.

A group post, MediaTech Ventures’ post (note I tagged myself), my own post, and here’s another one on my personal business Page.

Quora

Quora is a personal favorite that I’m going to share really just to help you think outside the box.  At the end of the day of course, this list could be endless and I can’t possibly explain how to share everywhere, so having touched on the big ones, let’s look at something unusual like a Question and Answer platform.

Are there ANY questions related to what you’ve covered in your article?  Have you answered them? 

Hop on Quora and search for such questions.  Use excerpts from your article and answer the question, be sure to link back to your article, and boom.

Often, you can re-purpose an article in endless ways to address any number of topics.

Examples!

• What is content syndication?
• How do you share your blog posts?

What of Pins, Instagrams, and more?

Like I said, I can’t possibly get into everything so hopefully this gives a foundation upon which to just change how you think about leveraging your content.  We’ve focused on the written word but the same concepts apply with photos, videos, and podcasts. 

Have a tip I’m missing?  Let us know in the comments.
Need or want help with this kind of thing? It’s kind of our expertise, grab us on the chatbot.

Oh and by the way…. see if you can also tell how we’ve fostered more content by linking to some things in the MediaTech wiki. Imagine, create listings for your work and leverage your content as you go.

Dang! One more thing! TELL YOUR FRIENDS. Use Slack, Facebook messages, an email, or a company or team policy, to make sure all of your partners are liking, sharing, and commenting on what you create! It starts with just a measure of support and you can get that from friends.