Getting More from What You’ve Got
My mom taught me a trick for getting more mileage out of kids toys. You rotate them. Put a train set away for 6 months and then get it back out … and it’s like someone bought them a brand new train set. I kid you not. While rotating a batch of toys last month, it occurred to me that a similar practice could work over in the audience development side of my brain.
You’ve heard us talk about using evergreen content to impact your SEO and how to identify existing content that is ripe for optimization and can drive more traffic to your website. With the impact of COVID, this exercise is a great way to lessen the impact of any content production decreases you might be experiencing due to staffing resources or freelance budget cuts. But more than likely, you’re going to need to dig beyond the standard players of ‘best restaurants’ or ‘things to do this weekend’ to make up for the fact that most of us aren’t really going out to eat or doing much on the weekends right now.
At this moment, when we’re all trying to get more from what we’ve got, focus on content from the past, including longform journalism and the award-winning or juicy stories from your archives. (Or the ones that hit just about 11 months before their time.) Find potential candidates for this by looking at your most trafficked stories from the last 5 years. There’s probably a few you can pull out, republish, and drive some engagement via email or social media.
Another idea, less inspired by parenting and more inspired by current podcast and content consumption habits, is breaking up your content and replicating it into different mediums. People streaming on Twitch are packaging up audio and launching podcasts. The stories that you tell should have life beyond the pageview or the printed page. For example, interview the people you profile in print on a virtual webinar or host a live Slack conversation with people of interest in your community. An evergreen listicle on the website makes a great multi-story Instagram post and saved Highlight. In other words, think about every medium in which you communicate with the consumer for each piece of content you publish.
Here are some other ways to recycle and re-packaged old content:
Host an in-Slack interview with a story subject as a way to reconnect or “where are they now” type of update. Translate that into a teaser conversation in an email, like Drop Me The Link from WaPo.
Tweet out article highlights in a tweet thread. (Here’s an example.) Be sure to link to the piece in each part of the thread, and label your tweets so they can stay in order.
Share throwback issues, covers, or articles online that date pre-Internet. If your publication has been around for awhile, dig into your physical archives and find content that is relevant … or even humorous.
Everyone loves podcasts. Turn your written pieces into audio stories. The goal is to give busy readers an easier way to keep themselves updated.
How are you getting more with what you’ve got right now? Drop a comment and let us know. We’ll round up the best ideas and drop them in our next newsletter.
