5 Ways to Do Content Like a Startup – When Every Piece Counts
Last week I attended Big Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska, a conference geared toward helping tech startups grow their businesses. This was DivvyHQ’s first Big Omaha, and it was invigorating to spend time with such creative, fearless people. Being the content nerd I am, I couldn’t help but take notice of the brand messaging and digital content that these smart startups are producing. Here are a few insights that stuck with me.
A “Do or Die” Content Strategy?
Content is important and necessary for every size of business, and in every industry. But perhaps there’s no content more important than to a startup organization. If you work for a larger, seasoned company, you can take a few risks with your content, try things and see where it goes. If it doesn’t work, scrap it and try something different. As a startup organization, you’re starting from scratch and everything you create must be carefully crafted in a way that people will not only take notice, but fall in love with your brand – and quickly. You don’t have the time or money to try things that don’t work. Every piece of content you produce tells people who you are and what you’re about, and for startups, you often don’t get a 2nd chance. You could say, the startup organization content strategy is “do [well] or die.”
Wait a minute…that’s a great content strategy for ANY size company! What if your organization, large or small, old or new, took a do-or-die approach to your content strategy?
What if every piece of content you produced could make or break your company?
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Knowing When To Quit It!
There’s a wonderful quote by W.C. Fields that goes like this: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”
There’s certainly no secret that our marketing strategies change more quickly these days. But, sometimes it feels like, rather than changing – things are simply accumulating. New platforms, new tactics, new content and engagement strategies, and new ways of measuring; it only seem to add to our ever-growing mountain of to-do’s.
And, maybe even the most radical is how fast we are latching our brand to more and more social networks. New networks and methods of conversing with our customers seem to come online every day. And I’ve noticed that the accumulation of all these networks is a very real distraction.
Really, It’s Not You – It’s Me… Right?
Now, okay, some of this is the business I’ve chosen. As a content marketing consultant in the digital space, I’ve got to keep up with “what the kids are dancing to” so I’m a “joiner” by nature. But I’ve noticed this entering into my client’s worlds as well – mostly by comparing two recent extremes.
I walked into Client A’s office recently to talk with them about Social Media and Content Marketing. They have no social media or content marketing strategy going at the moment. They’ve done some basic research – and they are simply overwhelmed at the prospect of having a “Blog/Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/LinkedIn/FourSquare/Quora/Pinterest” strategy. They are much relieved when I tell them that they shouldn’t even consider all that – and we begin to talk about what the “right” content marketing process is for them before they even consider which channels to converse on.
But, then – that same week – I go to Client B’s Office.
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DivvyHQ Features – What Comes Next?
We spent the months of February and March just listening and learning, and that gave us a clear direction of what you want Divvy to be, and trust me, our queue is as long as that Infographic we launched the other day.
While we have some clear priorities in the short-term, we want to continue listening to our user comminity to keep our “functionality pipeline” full of stuff you actually want. So, with that in mind, we’d like for you to weigh in on which big-ticket items we add to the top of our priority list with a rousing game of, “WHAT COMES NEXT?” (cue gameshow music)
Ready to Play?
In this round, we’ll be considering the following features. Bob, tell us what we’re looking at! (Use your best announcer voice, it will be funnier)
Sure, Jayme! First up, we have the full-screen layout! Users will enjoy using DivvyHQ with an expanded, responsive, full-screen layout!
Then, we have the DivvyHQ Mobile version. Perfect for those Divvyers on the go. This little diddy will give users a slick DivvyHQ experience on any mobile device!
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Five Steps to Evergreen Content: A Beginner’s Guide
If you’re responsible for marketing or producing content for your company (any size or industry), you need to understand the concept and importance of evergreen content. Let’s start with a little evergreen 101.
What is evergreen content?
- It is not dependent on a news cycle, so it’s always valuable to your target consumer
- It is keyword rich and consistently drives traffic to your site
For example: You are a small law firm that specializes in family law in the state of Maryland. You know that your consumers are going to need an attorney to draw up wills and legal trusts. You blog about these issues to attract new leads and demonstrate your knowledge in this specific area of the law. Your evergreen content is content that focuses on wills and legal trusts. If something changes, like a politician discussing potential changes to the laws that govern wills or legal trusts, you may need to create a piece of content that addresses that change. This timely piece might attract new audiences, which is great, but the timely nature of the post means it’s not evergreen and could be irrelevant in a matter of days, weeks or months.
How do I create evergreen content?
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New Feature: Sending Content Items to Multiple Team Members
With the recent launch of several new features, we thought it would be good to do a quick video demonstration of one of the most requested new features, which allows you to send a content item to multiple team members. Let’s jump into the video here so you know what the heck I’m talking about…
Can’t see the video? View it on YouTube.“Send To” Multiple Team Members
So let’s say that I’m a content producer for my team and I’ve been tasked with writing a blog post that is due to publish next week. I’ve created the first draft of the post in MS Word, uploaded it into Divvy and now I’m ready to send it to my editor for review. I also need to send it to my graphic designer to find a good photo that will fit the content.
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“Getting Started” with Divvy Just Got Better
Last week, we wrote briefly about the new getting-started experience in our New Features & Fixes post, but this enhancement to the site was so important, I though it would be good to go into a little more detail. Although, first, we have to call ourselves out on this one…we totally overlooked the first-time user experience. A completely blank dashboard might have felt the same as staring at a blank sheet of paper. BIG party foul on our part.
In our defense, we were working against a hard deadline to release our product, and it just got left out. But that’s not a good excuse. We’ve now seen the error of our ways and we’re asking for your forgiveness! As of last week, we have created a better “getting started” experience. Now when new users sign up or log in for the first time, there are three pieces of content in your sample calendar that are designed to help you learn to use the application.
Here’s what you’ll see now when you create a new account:
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A Lesson in Content Repurposing, Infographic Style
One of our mantras at Divvy is to help people work smarter, not harder. And in the world of content marketing, content repurposing is a great way to take a piece of evergreen content that you slaved over in the past, dust it off, repackage it in the popular content format of the day, publish it and then watch as your audiences embrace it as if it were a new piece. Such is the case with a helpful little blog post that I wrote back in March of 2011.
My First Guest Blog Post Ever
In early 2011, I was asked to guest blog for the Content Marketing Institute, which actually came from a consistent blog commenting strategy that I have executed for years. With their heavy focus on “how-to” content, I whipped up a post on the “12 Things You Need to Do After Writing a New Blog Post”. The checklist-style post was well received with thousands of retweets, likes and shares.
Now fast forward to March 2012. The infographic craze is in full swing, so I was perusing my content archives looking for something that I could turn into a good visual. I quickly recalled many CMI comments talking about how they had printed out the text-based checklist and had it pinned to their cube wall. BINGO! The rest is history…in the making.
Introducing “Your Blog Post Promotion Checklist” – Printing Instructions Below
New Features & Latest Bug Fixes
Our development team has been hard at work squashing bugs and adding enhancements to DivvyHQ, largely based on the expert feedback we’ve been receiving from our users. So without further ado, here’s a breakdown of what we’ve been tinkering with this past week:
Dead Bugs
- WYSIWYG Issues - Some of you have been experiencing issues with content saving in the WYSIWYG editor. Some content would be cut off, some would save, the rest would not, etc. Sorry about that! We fixed it. Now, you should not have problems with copying and pasting from Word or anything else for that matter. Be sure to use the “Paste Plain Text” and “Paste from Word” buttons to make sure it ignores the funky Microsoft code that tends to hide in your clipboard’s suitcase.
- WYSIWYG Character Limit – And while we’re on the subject of the WYSIWYG editor, we upped the character limit from 2000 characters to 16 million. If you happen to hit the that limit, we want to know about it, because you deserve a prize for writing the longest piece of content ever!
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Say Buh-bye to Content Version Control Issues
In this video, I discuss an issue that you and your team have probably run into…version control! We’ve certainly been battling it for years and today I’m going to show you how you can use DivvyHQ to eliminate most of those issues.
Can’t see this video? View it on YouTube: No More Version Control IssuesVersion Control Issue #1: Your Excel-based Editorial Calendar
It amazes me that content teams are still using Excel to manage their editorial calendars. As soon as someone makes a change to that file, everyone else’s copy is now outdated. Even if you have your editorial calendar file on some sort of shared server like Dropbox, you’re still going to run into conflicted copies of the file from time to time. And God forbid someone deletes the file accidentally.
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We’re Watching A Bunch of Other People Blog
I recently read Gini Dietrich’s post on Spin Sucks about her blogging process. Apparently, there’s this fun trend going on among the Creme de la Creme of bloggers where they document for their readers how they are able to churn out great blog content on a daily basis. In Gini’s article, she referenced a few other people who have written similar articles, including Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer.
I found a couple more posts like this here and here.
Content Nerd Alert!
So this process stuff is like candy to me. We are obsessed with editorial process and pretty much geek out about how different people and companies execute their content strategy…so these posts make me just giddy!
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