Blogging is key to successful inbound marketing. So why aren’t Channel Partners doing more of it? There is no single answer but lack of time is a prominent theme amongst Partners we work with. While we can’t add minutes to the clock, we can help Vendors introduce their Partners to a strategy for recycling content that makes content creation two to three times faster than writing blogs from scratch.
Repurposing content entails reducing a white paper, e-book, case study, or other larger content piece down to one or more articles and then creating slideshares, infographics, podcasts, videos, and other pieces of content to stand-alone or wrap around those blogs.
These tactics allow your Partners to leverage a single piece of content and gain more reach across multiple platforms. Repurposing is a great strategy but unfortunately since creating infographics, podcasts, and videos are also time consuming, it’s only republishing on other platforms that remedies the time crunch.
Recycling content is the practice of identifying older blogs previously posted on the Partner’s website and refreshing or rewriting and republishing them anew. This can be accomplished in two ways:
Recycle on page: The original blog is edited directly on the content management platform where it’s refreshed, the headline might be swapped out, the body text is altered, added to, and updated. Then it’s republished with a current date while keeping the same URL and keywords.
Republishing with the same URL and keywords allows the page to be seen and socialized as new (to viewers) without losing rank acquired when originally indexed by search engines. The key to this technique is to change and refresh the content enough that search engines will notice when they return to the site for indexing. Note: Think back to junior high – teachers knew which kids plagiarized the encyclopedia to write a report. Same thing here, it’s not good enough just to change a few words around.
Recycle from scratch: Another strategy is to completely rewrite a previous blog. Give it a new headline, URL, meta description, keywords, and repost as if it’s a completely new, unique article.
We rewrote these blogs from scratch but kept the same general theme. The body text, sub-headers, URLs, meta descriptions, and headlines are all unique and the angle has been refreshed. Most importantly, these two rewrites were accomplished in less than half the time it took to write just one blog from scratch. This is true because writing and editing time was greatly reduced and layout and subject matter was already defined.
original: Why You Need to Really Engage Your Audience at Your Next Event
recycled: Stay Top-of-Mind with Partners After Your Next Channel Event
original: 3 Ideas to Spring Clean Your Partner Programs
recycled: Like a Buyer’s Journey are you Helping Channel Partners Down the Partner Journey?
With a little help from website and social media analytics it’s easy for Partners’ to see their most popular blogs.
Recycling content on page: Well-read blogs already have SEO value and can benefit from the first type of recycling where Partners refresh, change the headline (or not), and keep the original URL and keywords. This is true because your Partners have already done the hard work to help this post gain page rank in search. Maybe it even hit the first page of Google. A complete rewrite at this point will waste that effort. Instead, keeping the URL and making updates and refreshing the concept will add new value to an already valuable piece of content.
Recycling content as new: Blogs that show little traction are poised for complete rewrites. Search engines crave new, fresh content. They factor your Partners’ posting cadence into the algorithms and new blogs signal a level of seriousness about providing resources to prospects searching for solutions. This helps your Partners rank organically in search results.
There are many reasons good blog articles go to waste. Sometimes the hosting website is too new and it takes time to build a relationship with search engines. Other times it’s because the social reach to broadcast the blog isn’t there yet so enough traffic wasn’t pulled in from social. It’s not because your Partners wanted to waste their time writing a bad article. So, rewriting a solid blog that was posted too early in the inbound marketing adoption process is the best way to get new value from work that was already done.
Why not just rewrite and use the same URL? In this case, a blog with no reach has done virtually nothing to fuel inbound traffic. Adding a new URL with new keywords and a headline that is more likely to convert can give rewritten blogs a better chance at ranking than simply refreshing and republishing.
These rewrites are considered new blogs in the eyes of search engines vs. being seen as updates of previously posted blogs. That’s because they are new. We all know search engines are smart and like most junior high school teachers they recognize cheaters and act accordingly.
Channel Partners are overloaded and laser-focused on building their businesses. These busy Partners often view social media and blogging as necessary evils… until they see results. Results won’t happen overnight but helping your Partners get to that point without adding to their to-do lists is essential to stoking the inbound demand generation machine you both want. Using strategies like repurposing and recycling older content is a great place to start.
Looking for more ways to use strategy for thru Partner marketing? Help them get fired up about social media with this new pocket guide.