Traditional ways of grabbing customer attention has become far too commonplace. According to Content Marketing Institute, the average person used to see about 2,000 ads per day in 1984. Now, they see more than 5,000 - and ignore the vast majority of them.So how do you capture attention in a world that's over-run with marketing materials and short attention spans? The answer is clear: you have to create the type of content that people actually want to read. In recent years, the field of content marketing has exploded. More than 50 percent of companies now have some form of content marketing strategy.During my years as a content marketing manager at Atlassian, I've learned a lot of about the writing process, and how to ensure that we create articles and guides that can compete with the massive amount of content that's published on the internet on a daily basis.
For me, that process starts with an organized editorial calendar. Here are some of the steps, along with a free Trello template, that I've used to set up our current editorial calendar and keep track of our content. Once you've developed a good idea of who your readers are and what kind of content they're interested in, you'll need to boil all this information into a comprehensive blog vision statement. To keep your editorial calendar on track, set clear expectations of how often you plan to publish. Without clear deadlines, your publishing schedule will become inconsistent and you'll forget to follow up on blogs.How often you're able to publish comes down to your resources and how many people are able to write for your blog.
Other crucial considerations for publishing cadence are how often your customers are coming to your blog (versus finding your posts on social media or through search engines) and whether you want high-quality in-depth content or are okay with posting shorter blogs as well.These days most people don't go directly to a website to read blog posts, according to statistics from Hubspot. It's more likely that they'll find your content through a search engine or on social media.
It's also worth noting that longer-form high-quality posts (think about 1,500 words) are more likely to show up in search engines or be shared.That being said, for the average blog it makes more sense to focus on publishing a small number of quality pieces of content than it does to try to pump out tons of posts.A good place to start is by setting a goal of publishing one blog post a week, and then adjust from there. If you end up having the resources to produce multiple high quality blog posts per week, then by all means go for it!
When it comes to finding authors for your content, you pretty much have three choices:. Have your editorial team author all your content.
Hire freelancers. Accept pitches from colleagues across your companyTo help make your decision, let's go through the pros and cons of each choice.If you use your editorial team, you know that all of your content is going to be top-notch. These are the people who know exactly what your company voice is and will require little editing. The problem is, most companies have a relatively small editorial department. Do you have enough people to publish as frequently as you want to? Do you have the budget to hire more in the future?
These are some of the questions you need to ask yourelf if you plan to take this approach.For editorial teams that need a little bit of extra help, hire freelancers. This will be less costly than hiring someone full-time, and you can also expect that their writing will be high quality because, well, that's their job. The only problem is that they won't be as familiar with your company and might require some extra editing when it comes to tone and voice. It's also worth noting that freelancers tend to come and go at a whim, so when you hire a freelancer, your money isn't necessarily going toward a long term investment.You can also include a wide range of perspective on your blog by allowing anyone from any department at your company to pitch and contribute to your blog. This can be a great option because you'll get experts on a topic writing about what they know best. However, writing may not be their strongest skill so they will require extra editing.
Christopher Handley
You also have to factor in that, given writing posts isn't their only job, it may take them longer to finish posts. An editorial calendar is a roadmap for the rest of your publication. In our editorial calendar, writers start by adding a Trello card to the pitches column. In the card description, they are asked to answer a series of questions that help us gauge whether their idea belongs on the blog including:. What's your story idea?. Why are you writing this piece?.
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Who is your target audience?. What is your goal for this article? Do you have a tangible viewership goal?
The Editorial Board
Or action you'd like a reader to take? What is measurable and what is qualitative?. How will a reader benefit from reading your article?. Has this topic been covered on the Atlassian blog before? The editorial team then looks through each of the pitches and determines how valuable the piece of content will be to our readers. We consider criteria such as its relevancy to our blog themes, whether it's inspiring, fresh, and if it's timely.We also take into account how easy it will be to distribute, based on if it's particularly well-suited for social media or if we think it could do well from an SEO perspective.Pitches that are well-suited to gain a lot of traffic via social media, for example, usually have a strong, controversial opinion and revolve around a topic that will encourage conversation. If we want to optimize a piece to rank high for a certain search query in Google, however, we look for ideas that have potential to answer a lot of common questions on a given topic.
You may have noticed that the last column on our board is not 'publish.' That's because you can't just put your blog posts out into the world and forget about them. To really have a successful publication, you'll want to keep checking back in on your posts to see if there are opportunities to re-promote them.We also make a point to regularly sift through our old content and see how it could be updated to be more timely. Sometimes, just changing the first paragraph of a blog post and its headline can make it relevant to a current event and give it some extra buzz on social media.