Create Authority | Don’t Hate Your Website

by | Sep 1, 2014 | Content | Social Media | Email, Marketing, SEO | Web Design

Create authority with your content.

Let’s face it, researching and writing content takes time. Even if you are a pretty fast writer, it is still an hour or two to produce something worth sharing. So when you take the time to create a blog or white paper keep those notes and use them to produce a podcast, video or slide deck.

Sounds great in theory, but how does it really work? This round up blog post will show you how we put the pieces together for a series on common web design mistakes.

Start with an idea

We started with a brainstorm session. We sat around one day making a list of the mistakes we saw time and time again as we looked at small business websites.

The list got pretty long, so we divided it into two blog posts Ten reasons prospects hate your website and Ten reasons search engines hate your website. Although these posts are three years old they still get regular traffic because the majority of the content is still relevant. Recently, I went in and updated some of the information to account for changes in the Google algorithm. This updating makes the post more relevant for readers, and gives me a chance to ping Google, and encourage them to take another look at the post.

We published them a day apart and included links between the posts. The process of cross linking helps Google connect the dots between two posts on the same topic. It also helps visitors find related information, encouraging them to stay on the site a little longer.

Use popular blog posts as a foundation for a download

The traffic to the posts and the comments clearly indicated we had something people were interested in, so we converted the two blog posts to a short download. We took the basic outline, reorganized the information, fleshed out the details on a few of the topics  and published it with a conversion form as a white paper entitled, Don’t Hate Your Website.  

If you download the white paper you will see we keep it pretty simple.  It is essentially a word document with a little bit of extra formatting.  These white papers are disposable media, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend too many design resources.

Create authority when you establish yourself as a subject matter expert

Seminars are a part of our regular routine at Roundpeg, so now we had an outline we could use to build a short workshop.  Why People Hate Your Website is still one of the most popular courses in our schedule.  And since I needed to create a slide deck for the presentation, I made sure to upload it to SlideShare.net and then share the program in my Linkedin profile.

Three years ago after the posts were originally published, we recorded a podcast, but lets face it, some of the things we focused on back then have changed, so it was time for a refresh. Using the same outline, Jarred and I recorded a new podcast which you can listen to from the player below

Why Everyone Hates Your Website

by Jarred Juitt | More than a Few Words

Visual support

In addition to all the written and recorded content we created a series of graphics which we use to attract attention on social media and in our weekly newsletter.  Since we use similar titles this graphic works equally well to promote the white paper, seminar or podcast.

Build over time

I would love to pretend we knew all along this would be a theme. We didn’t. But over time, we found different ways to reuse, re-purpose and update the information. By tying the pieces together in this round up post I have created additional cross links and an easy way to find all the relevant information.

Take the next steps.

  • Pick a topic
  • Write a series of blog posts or better yet, review the library of content which already exists
  • Create a download
  • Record a podcast or video
  • Create a presentation
  • Teach a seminar or make a presentation at an industry event
  • Create a graphic
  • Share content on social media and in your newsletter

So now you have a road map you can use to establish authority on a specific subject.  Start reusing!

 

 

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RP MTFW no time to read pin

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