Anytime you are creating content in any form, you need to ask yourself, “How many different places will this be used?”
When you are writing copy for your website, you are “keyword conscious”, right? Well, if the press release you are writing is going to be distributed electronically, shouldn’t you be keyword conscious there, too? Ditto for blog postings, Tweet’s, etc. Even emails. If a potential client is searching his email database and he doesn’t remember your name, if he searches for , , or in his saved emails, are you going to turn up?
I can remember a situation where a staffer in the marketing department at a client of mine bought some stock photos to put up on their corporate website. Some of the pix were gorgeous. The company’s owner fell in love with three of the shots and wanted to use them in fairly large format print campaign. The staffer had purchased low-res images only for the website, so they had to go back and purchase the high-res versions. Was it a ton of money? No, but it was a waste of time … the pix needed to be color corrected again, etc. Edit a picture once. Save it in as high-res, easily editable format as you can. Tweak the size and resolution and use it over and over with “Save For Web & Devices” or similar “export” functions. (Note: Be sure not to violate any copyright laws or use licenses for images you don’t own.)
When we talk to potential clients about website design, we talk to them about content creation and management solutions, and when we say, “content management” we don’t just mean a CMS system or WordPress back-end … we’re talking to them about outsourced content creation and re-purposing on an ongoing basis. Writing blogs and Tweets. Publishing newsletters. Making press releases. Creating email marketing content. Creating videos. Writing white papers (with customer’s input and assistance). Tweaking RSS feeds to improve relevance and quality. Manually creating prominent links to articles/news items of substantial relevance and import. This is integrated with a social media effort – tagging, following, recommending, etc. Creating fresh polls and putting them up each period. Small to mid-sized businesses typically don’t have the marketing resources required to pull this off. If they have someone who is going to be their “webmaster” he or she is typically wearing 10 other hats and is as likely to be a “techie” as a marketer.
After all, building an online marketing presence isn’t just about putting up your site. Certainly, the day your site launches or the day you add new capabilities are mileposts. But, they are mileposts that are quite near the start of the race … and the race has no finish line. Making sure you aren’t wasting time having to create multiple versions of the same content means you will more time to re-purpose content, to cast your net as broadly as possible.