How to start boosting your content before it’s even published
When you’re running a young company, spending an hour on a blog post or long-form article can feel like an incredible time sink, so every piece of content should return the value of your time invested (and then some) by building awareness, growing a following, and maybe even generating leads. To help boost your content’s ROI, I advise my Modular startup clients to use a process called ‘content priming.’
But, rather than trying to accomplish these things after the article goes live, there’s an approach I like to take to setting the article up to live its best life.
I call this process of thinking and preparing your posts in advance, ‘content priming.’
What is Content Priming?
When I was running marketing at VentureBeat, I had to come up with an everyday practical process for a lean team to maximize quality and views on specific types of content while minimizing the time it took to publish that content. This is where I came up with the concept of ‘content priming.’
The idea behind ‘content priming’ is that you do the bulk of your thinking and planning for your content prior to publishing, so that when it’s time to go live, you can make the process more automated. This helps you get your articles out faster and put your post-‘publish efforts into interacting with readers, responding to comments, and prepping your next piece.
Here’s how to prime your content:
Ask yourself: “How can I ready my content ahead of time to be as successful as possible?”
The whole idea behind Content Priming is that you do the bulk of your thinking and planning for your content up front so you can put it on autopilot. That way, you can put your real-time efforts into interacting with readers, responding to comments, and prepping your next piece.
Think: “What are all of the things that we need to have in place in order to make this as successful as possible and to take up the least amount of my time as possible?
10 Tips For Content Priming
1.) Embed keywords into your content.
Keywords help boost your piece in search engines, which is free traffic to your website. Make two lists of keywords. One is for the phrases that are most common within the context, the exact language someone would use to talk about or search for your article’s topic. The other is for longtail keywords that are more niche and searched less frequently but have less competition to showing up in search. It’s general good to have a mix of both types of keywords to capture both breadth and depth of audience, but this may vary depending on your article strategy.
2.) Embed and tag images.
Use <alt> tags on all images as search engines also factor in these image keywords when crawling your site.
3.) Pick interesting images.
What kind of images make sense with your article? Product photos or general stock images? If you go for the latter, make sure they are relevant and not overly generic or you could risk your company appearing cold or unthoughtful. Also be sure to have alternative photos ready to swap out and re-present your content as a fresh post. Check out my article on repackaging for more on re-using content effectively. Finally, how about formatting? Have them sized ahead of time and, if it’s an original image, there should be a brand logo in the bottom right hand corner.
4.) Select social hashtags.
Social has its own mini search ecosystem. Research and pick the top #s that complement your content, are platform-specific, and align with your visibility goals. The SEO tips above are also good considerations (we like to use a mix of popular and unpopular but specific #s).
5.) Workshop headlines.
The headline should state exactly what’s in the article and that deliver on a promise, making someone curious enough to click. For example, the reader will be: entertained, learn something, and/or possess a valuable piece of information that puts them as an authority figure, etc. This is what makes a headline compelling. It’s usually worth ‘workshopping’ headlines ahead of time amongst a core group of people. I also have further tips for writing effective headlines here.
6.) Write 2–3 social headlines.
A social headline is separate from the article headline and gives the viewer more of a tease to see what’s inside. This lead-in should be conversational in tone, and a nice complement to a more polished article title. The first social headline should be the best because it will probably get the most visibility, AND it should absolutely be retweetable/reshareable as-is (i.e; not self-referential). The second/third social headlines should be a variation to use for republishing, but also lets you test the audience’s receptivity to a topic and tone.
7.) Include 2–3 links back to your trial/signup landing page.
Every article should contain 2–3 links in relevant context that direct the reader back to the goal — to get exposed to and ideally sign up for a trial. One link alone will get lost, two is the baseline, and three is recommended especially for longer articles (ideal is: 1st at the top, 2nd at a relevant location within the article, and the third at the bottom). Images that link back to the landing page can also be a clever, eye-catching variation. With all three links, the rule is that they all have the same call-to-action (even if phrased differently) and drive the reader to the same spot and request the same action.
8.) Highlight 3–5 solid, shareable sentences.
Each article needs to contain polished sentences primed for sharing and that help the content shine. These can be used as pullout quotes to emphasize their significance. Tweets with ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or ‘our,’ like ‘Check out my post on productivity’ don’t get shared as broadly as ‘Why you’re thinking about productivity all wrong.’ Medium also has a capability for readers to direct-tweet content that they’ve highlighted. Subtly encourage your readers to do so with sentences that elicit emotion and spark thinking.
9.) Create 2–3 images or visual quote cards.
Research shows that regardless of the platform (short-form like Twitter or blended like Facebook) visual posts get more engagement: clicks, opens, reads, shares, etc. so don’t forget this as part of your strategy! A screenshot of the tool, an image of a distributed team putting it in action, or even putting a quote onto a Canva (the social media image app) card could work. When a reader on Medium tweets out a sentence from the post, it’s automatically applied to a visual card, which is great. But we also want to have images be part of our original content, and not just on Twitter, but on other networks where it’s even more important.
10.) List of share partners’ contact info and outreach templates. Friend-influencers or people in your extended circle who’d be willing to distribute your piece will be a big part of your content sharing strategy at first. Just before we publish, we want to be primed to flag them and ask for their help. It will slow down the process if we have to go hunting for their twitter handles or email addresses or if we have to stew over how to approach them once the article is live. On the other hand, if you have already made a list and a (modifiable) standard couple phrases to use to introduce them to the piece and ask if they’d be willing to share with their network, it can be an accelerated publish-and-recruit process.
It’s a lot to think about, but preparing all these things before publishing a post or article means it will do better on social and in search, and will have a much better chance of eyeballs, engaged readers, and followers. You’ve already spent time and money producing a piece, so you might as well prime it to give you as much leverage as possible.
