How to Streamline and Automate Content Creation on Big Websites?

This content was contributed by a guest author. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Blog Hands.

There is no doubt that content has become the most crucial factor for any business to gain a good ranking on search engines and attract high traffic on their website. But, reusing content that has been published before is not the optimal choice to attract an audience, anyone can create mediocre content. However, creating unique, informational, and relevant content with the right marketing strategy can make the difference.

We know creating unique and quality content takes time, effort, resources, energy, and knowledge but it’s worth your time and investment. If you’re working with a team of content writers and marketers, you should know that the overall process of content creation and marketing is not easy at all. The audience has become more selective and sophisticated than ever, so if you want to get the right content to your target audience, you’ll have to streamline and automate your content creation strategy.

In this article, we’ll talk about some ideas and techniques that can help you streamline and automate your content creation process.

Define Your Objective

Before taking any step to streamline your content creation process, it’s necessary to know what your brand wants to accomplish. If you have a content marketing plan in mind, break it into campaigns that involve specific pieces of content, and then set key performance indicators per campaign so that every content has a clear purpose. Most common goals are:

• Improving search engine visibility

• Increasing brand awareness

• Converting traffic into genuine leads

• Building brand trust and authority

Defining an objective will help you direct the whole content creation process and allow you to assign tasks to your team members easily.

Create a Knowledge Bank

Once your objective is clear, you need to create a knowledge bank  where you can store, organize, tag and reference all the information you gather from your team, the content that has already been created and the insightful research you’ve accumulated. Each employee in your organization has a wealth of specialized knowledge that can produce new content ideas. And what’s better than creating a knowledge bank to leverage your team’s collective expertise and perspectives.

Initially, building a knowledge bank is a lofty task, but with the help of a data management calendar, you can make things easier. For small businesses, a data management calendar can be a whiteboard, whereas for large organizations it can be a collaborative online platform, such as Asana, Trello, Podio, etc.

Define the Content Creation Process to Your Team

Defining the content creation process means implementing a structured procedure that can be carried out for each new piece of content created. With this process, you can outline who will do what, and when they will do it. Consider a to-do-list for every piece of content you want to produce on your website.

Setting a clear process will make your team more proficient and streamlined. When each team member knows what they are doing now, and what they will do next, your content creation process will automatically move forward. But, you’ve to make sure that none of your team members exempt themselves from this process on a regular basis.

Limit the Number of Links in Your Main Navigation

A great rule of thumb to automate content on big websites is to limit the number of menu items in your navigation menu. If a website has a high number of links across the top, there are chances that the audience will skip over essential items. So, limit the number of links to six or seven in your top-level navigation.

However, you can implement links and statistics in the internal content, such as articles, blogs, and web content to keep users engaged. This will also help you optimize content on your website and rank on search engines. For example, Rentberry uses statistics about thehousing in Dallas and other cities to create lots of landing pages visual information for the users automatically.

Get an Internal Communication Platform

If you’re using email as your content scheduling and communication channel, then you are making a big mistake because it will frequently create email threads of 40-60 emails in every team member email account. We are not saying that emails are not beneficial anymore, but for internal communications, you must use a better platform. For example, you can use automated chatbots that allow you to create separate chat rooms around specific topics.

It’s essential that all your team members have all the information related to the upcoming content project and get notified in advance about their role in it. So, creating different chat rooms for different topics will improve productivity and collaboration between team members. Apart from Chatbots, you can alsouse automation to avoid routine mistakes; it helps you stay focused on the current task while eliminating other unnecessary errands.

Configure Your Content Management System

After assigning the tasks to your team members, you’ll have to keep track of who is responsible for which area of the site. Though using existing company calendar will make it easier for you, but you’ll have to configure your Content Management System to support your new content alert system. To configure the CMS for new content creation, take help from your technical team.

With a configured CMS, you can manage things more easily. It will help you analyze your content creation process, identify ways to improve it, and then how to implement those changes. In short, a configured CMS enables you to optimize the overall content on your website in an efficient way.

Engage Your Audience

If your business website is highly visual, then the user-generated content can save you a lot of time while giving you a perfect opportunity to engage your customers. Instead of thinking what content people want, why not to ask them to create it themselves? For instance, social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. are a great way for businesses to get exposure to the external audience.

You can simply ask your customers to write and submit a post on social media by sponsoring them. It gives your easily sourced content, but most importantly, you get user engagement. It will also make your customers feel valued while creating long-term relationships with them.

Update Your Existing Content

Many big websites often think that having more content is better, so they keep creating more and more blogs instead of updating the previous work. Creating new content is essential but updating the previous content is more important than that. If you don’t update the old content with time, it will lose its value

So, review your content library every few months to refresh your old work. Remove any outdated information and replace it with current business landscape or trends.

Conclusion

When you want to develop and improve your content, don’t overthink it. The most important thing in the content creation process is the continuous collaboration with your marketing team. The techniques mentioned above can help you streamline and automate your content creation process.

Guest Author Bio:

Shirley Lowe is a professional real estate marketer and aspiring property owner. She's very fond of PropTech and shares her opinions on Landlord Tips and REAL Trends.