How to know what you should and shouldn’t post.
Creating new and original content is an excellent way to promote your brand and increase your online engagement rates. At the same time, it can be a very time consuming task and may require someone on the team allocated to that task full-time.
In fact, over the last two years we’ve written quite a few articles to help our users create content and write better copy. Here are a few of them in case you’d like to revisit them or know more about the topic:
- The Content Era
- How to write engaging content even if you don’t like writing.
- Setting goals for your content marketing strategy
- The 5 best tips for writing great ad copy
But although we have shared a lot about how to get your writing going, we haven’t focused much on how to decide when not to post or when you should be curating your content to get better results.
Set realistic goals
When you start your content strategy, you should keep a few KPIs in mind in order to evaluate how your posts are performing relative to your expectations. Here it’s important to keep your goals realistic and iterate regularly based on your past results.
For example, if you’re starting a blog an unrealistic goal would be to expect your first post to go viral. Although not completely impossible, this is very unlikely to happen at your first try. A realistic goal would be to gain x new followers during the first month or expect an increase on your engagement rate of x percent in the second month.
Once you have set your goals, it’s time to start posting and creating your content so you can assess whether you are achieving them or not. If you fail almost all your KPIs, then you should probably take a look at the type of content you are sharing and maybe try a few different things.
Understand your audience
Before you even start defining your content strategy, you should first know who your audience is as they should determine the tone, type of content and even the frequency of your posts.
For example, if you own a technological brand and are aiming to create tech-related content then you can post fairly often, as people who are usually interested in knowing more about a specific technology are used to reading a lot about the topic.
However, if you are targeting older people who don’t spend that much time online, you won’t need to post so often and should concentrate your attention on creating compelling content.
Understanding your audience plays a very important role when it comes to curating content, because you depend on readers for views. So if they’re not clicking you should try making some changes to your strategy.
That means that if you don’t put yourself in your readers’ shoes and try to imagine what they would like to know more about, then you may well be writing content that appeals to you rather than to them. If you are having a tough week or are unable to decide whether your piece would appeal to your audience, try asking them. Talking to your audience directly and putting questions to them is an excellent way to curate your future content by keeping their needs and taste in mind.
Write and then rewrite
Probably the most important step in content curation is reading what you’ve written before you post it or asking someone to do this for you. Sometimes we get so involved in what we are doing that we lose the ability to curate our content and judge whether it is well written and engaging and whether it makes sense to post at all.
To avoid that situation, try writing your content a few days in advance so you can read it the next day and make a few changes if needed and spell check everything. By giving it a few days, you gain some distance between you and the piece, allowing you to read your own content with a fresh mindset that will make it easier for you to curate it.
Also, if you write a piece that you don’t feel comfortable in sharing because it doesn’t have the necessary quality, then it is always better not to post it, or to at least wait a few days to see whether you still feel the same way. Although keeping a posting schedule is important, it is far more important to make sure you only deliver pieces of content that you feel proud of and that can speak to your audience.
To sum it up, there is no magic formula for creating the perfect blog post or making sure that your content always meets your goals, but there are a few ways to get closer to it. Set goals and measure your success regularly; understand your audience and cater your content to them and, finally, read your content and post it only when you feel passionate about it — or don’t post it at all.
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