One of the things that I hear the most often when I first start talking to people about their marketing is:
“Man, I wish I had more time to spend on my SEO. But between my facebook group and my LinkedIn pod and the Instagram stories, I run out of time. And I know I should write that blog post, but I don’t have time! I wish I could get me off that social media hamster wheel … but I can’t leave my social media audience hanging.”
Social media is a great place for us to be connecting with other entrepreneurs to be in front of our ideal clients. But it can also be a little bit of a drag on our energy, because it is so frequent! For example, they say now that the average lifespan of a tweet is 18 minutes. So if you want to stay at the top of that Twitter feed, you’re gonna have to post three times an hour, that’s no fun for anybody.
So what are the ways that you can continue to engage with your social media audience … but also create content that will last beyond that 24 hour social media algorithm? SEO, of course!
Here’s my process for creating SEO content and distributing via social media & email. This way you’re not spending as much time creating content that will disappear in a day. But instead, you’re building long term assets that waterfall down into your social media.
7 Steps to Repurpose your SEO Content for Social
Many of us start our conversations on social media because it’s time sensitive. And then we run out of time to create something long term because we don’t have the bandwidth to do it all.
I’m going to encourage you to flip the way that you do things. Instead of starting with social media, you start by thinking about what is going on your website!
You can have this same ideas happening across all channels to make it easy on yourself! Talk about the same thing on your blog, your email, AND your social media.
You might think, “Oh, no, people are gonna get tired of hearing from it from me!” The fact is, people aren’t paying as close attention to you as you think they are. I. So it’s better to have the same consistent messaging across all your platforms. And it’ll take a whole lot less time than creating individual content for each platform!
So what’s my approach to doing this? No surprise: I start with keyword research.
1. Start with keyword research
Start with keyword research: knowing what people are already looking for. If you only write in response to specific questions people ask you, you’re limited.
You don’t have to pull ideas out of the air. Google will give you every possible idea that you could come up with. (Here are 4 easy content brainstorming tools.)
Use keyword research tools to find specific things that people are already Googling. This indicates that people are curious about these topics.
2. Write your blog post
And then the next phase would be start creating content of that topic. Find what people are looking for, and then create content to answer their questions. This way, you know you know you have an audience for it.
But Google can take a while to actually kick in and notice that you are starting to produce this content. You don’t have to sit around and twiddle your fingers until Google notices you you’re not a wallflower. You You’re awesome, and you want people to see it.
3. Publish & promote right away
After you produce the blog post or video or podcast, switch into promotion mode. This can look different for everybody’s business, but here’s what works for me:
When I create a new YouTube video or publish a new blog post, I always send an email out. That way I know people will visit my YouTube channel or blog post within a pretty quick period of time.
And that’s good for the YouTube algorithm, that people are watching the video within 24 hours).
It’s also good for my blog, because an influx of traffic triggers the Google robots to re-index. When you publish a new blog post, you don’t have to go into search console to request indexing. Instead, send it out via email, and let your readers trigger Google for you!
4. Create visual content for your blogs, podcasts & videos
The next thing that I recommend is to create visuals that go along with your content.
For blog posts: create an image, like a infographic or a pull quote, that you can share on social media. Give people a quick visual glance of what it is that they can expect from that particular post.
For podcasts: Since podcasts are audio only, create a visual version of it. A pull quote graphic is easy, or an audio gram that takes a clip and puts it over your cover art. (We use Headliner to create our audiograms; that referral link will get you a 2-week trial.)
For video: If you have a YouTube channel, take little clips and post them to social media! You can upload those files (or snippets of them) on to Facebook, IGTV, and LinkedIn.
5. Re-publish to syndication sites
And if it makes sense for your industry, you may want to take that same blog post and share it out to syndication sites. The most popular of those is Medium.
Medium will not negatively impact the SEO of that particular article if you import the story. This will add a disclaimer that says, “This post was originally published on this date at this location.” That’s called a canonical link. It indicated to Google, “Send the Google search traffic over to the original page, not to the page on Medium.”
By republishing on sites like this, you can tap into a whole audience of people there. You can do the same thing on LinkedIn, by adding it to your Articles.
But all these promotion strategies have short-term value, like a 24 to 48 hour window.
People aren’t going to go way back in their emails or way back in your LinkedIn feed to read old content.
So what are some ways that we can still continue to share your content long term?
6. Use a social media scheduler & content repurposing tool
Load that into a tool for repurposing content for you and post it for you multiple times!
I use a tool called CoSchedule because I love its integration with WordPress. (That’s an affiliate link)
Using the CoSchedule plugin, I can post my blog to social media from within WordPress. It shows up on my marketing calendar, and from there I can add it into my requeue. The requeue folder automatically posts that content every couple of weeks. And that way people who weren’t following me a few months ago, we’ll see it this time.
CoSchedule isn’t the only repurposing tool! I’ve also tried Smarter Queue, Social Bee & Meet Edgar. I liked all 3 of these, but settled on CoSchedule because I like the WordPress integration.
Whatever tool you use, make sure that you don’t have a content graveyard hanging out on your website!
7. Share & smart loop on Pinterest using Tailwind
Another tool that might help promote your content in a long term way is Pinterest. Pinterest is a great tool for sharing visual content then driving traffic to your website.
After create taller images for every blog post, load them into your Pinterest account.
Then you can use use Tailwind‘s SmartLoop function to automatically re publish them to Pinterest! You can choose your settings for how often to re-publish, as frequently as every couple of days or hours. Once you set this up, it is very much a set it and forget it tool.
Our 6-step content repurposing workflow
So to give you an idea of how I promote my content, so that way it will have a lifespan past the 48 hours after I publish.
- Publish YouTube video & complimentary blog post
- Share the link to both via email newsletter
- Upload teaser videos to Facebook, LinkedIn and IGTV with a link to the full blog/video
- Add blog & Youtube links to CoSchedule re-queue so they’ll republish automatically
- Create Pinterest images & post/smart loop on Tailwind
- Over the next few days, post audiograms or carousels to give a sneak preview
I you feel like you’ve been spending too much time on social media, and you wish you could take a break … Start by creating evergreen content!
Choose one or two days a week that you have that evergreen content published to your channels. And then you only need to fill in one or two other days a week with the fresher content or the engagement posts. This will gives you a little bit of a break from that social media hamster wheel.
So instead of feeling like you need to be creating all the time, having a republishing plan can free up your time.