During your overall content creation strategy, do you ask yourself before spending time on any piece of content whether or not it is scalable? It’s a good idea to consider this issue. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create some content that can only exist in one format, but it does mean that you might want to spend less time and effort on content that cannot be repurposed.

* Look at Your Content Goals – During every stage of content creation it’s important to keep tabs on whether the content you’re producing is working or not. First, take a look at your content goals and then check your metrics to ensure that the content you’re creating is getting you closer to meeting those goals. Plus, evaluate whether the content you have already can benefit from scaling.

* Repurpose – Can you repurpose old blog posts? Can you create infographics out of stats that you’ve collected? Can you create a slide share off an old report? How about a YouTube video? If you can create anything you have already made into a different format with added flavor based on the place it will be distributed, then you will make the most of your content.

* Evaluate New Content for Scalability – Going forward, evaluate each potential new piece of content for scalability in advance of creating it. That way you won’t waste as much time or money on content that can’t be used in other ways. Once you have decided what content can be repurposed and used in different ways, craft a plan to get it done.

* Make Use of Technology – The other issue about content scalability is the technology available to deliver your content. Is your website responsive? If not, then it will be difficult for some of your users to view your content in any form. Make use of the technology that is available and upgrade your technology quickly to become responsive. More people are buying mobile technology than are buying PCs today, so the time is now.

It’s important to deliver the right content to the right people using the right channels at the right time. To do this you need to research your audience, plan the content you will deliver and know what technology you need to deliver it. Plus, you need to know when your audience is ingesting the content and through what mediums. This takes a lot of research and time spent on understanding how everything works in concert together.

Once you garner an understanding of how everything works together, you’ll be able to ensure that you create mostly scalable content that will enable you to get more bang for your content buck. If you can reach more people with the same amount of content but distributed through different technology in different formats, you’ll essentially unleash a multiplier effect that will explode your reach exponentially.

When you create a video blog and publish it, you’re not done. You will now need to do work to promote your videos, as well as your blog and YouTube channel. The more time you spend on promotion, the more opportunity you have to get the word out to your audience. It’s not hard to do if you know what to do. These ideas will give you a start at video blog promotion.

* Put Them on YouTube – Host your public vlogs on YouTube because that is the most popular video blogging platform available. They’ll be ranked higher, and you can use their system to easily promote your vlogs.

* Embed Them in Your Blog – Even though the vlog is on YouTube, you should still write a blog post and intro to the vlog and embed it into your blog. Remember to include in the title that a video is included, and include a good description.

* Allow Others to Embed Them – Don’t disable the ability for people who like your video to embed it into their own blogs. This will give you more exposure.

* Share on Twitter – Always share your video blogs, from your blog post on Twitter, with a very short blurb to entice people to watch it.

* Share on Facebook – Using Facebook to share videos is a great way to get the word out about your video. Shorter videos are best, using either the Embed feature or just a link with a short blurb.

* Share on Google+ – Naturally you should share everything you do on Google+ because of the fact that Google Search is still the number one search engine.

* Add an Appropriate Title – A keyword-rich, direct and to-the-point title is the best thing you can do for every blog post, video or not.

* Don’t Forget the Description – On YouTube there is a place to describe the video. It’s important to use the space you have to its full potential to include a link to your website and any products you are promoting.

* Use Tags Effectively – Using tags is often skipped today. Some people swear they’re useless, but they’re there for a reason. Use descriptive tags that mean something with keywords that fit the video.

* Like Your Own Video – It might seem strange but liking your own videos is important as it gets people started, plus people who are connected to you see that you liked it and it’s another way to show up in their streams.

* Create Video Responses to Other People’s Videos – If you have a good video that fits as a response to someone else’s video, especially if they are popular, send it as a video response after personalizing it as a response. This may earn you an entirely new audience.

Marketing and promoting your video blogs is an important step to making sure that people see the work you’ve done and start recognizing you as the expert you are. Don’t hide your work by continuously producing without promoting.

Creating content isn’t just about text blog posts; it’s about a whole host of different types of content, and even more than what is listed below. However, these are the types of content that are most consumed by all types of audiences.

1. Memes – These are images that invoke certain emotions combined with quotes from someone famous, or even from yourself if you have written something profound, factual or thoughtful. You can use a site like Canva.com to make your memes.

2. Infographics – If you have data-centric content and need a new way to impart the information to your audience, use an infographic. An infographic is a long graphic with many images and data explained in an easily understandable way.

3. Short Blog Posts – Have blog posts that are about 500 words long that explain information that is very focused on one topic. This type of post can provide an informational overview on a topic, but doesn’t go that in-depth.

4. Long Blog Posts – Every person who is using content for marketing should include long in-depth, authoritative pieces of content. These can be anywhere from 750 to 3000 words. These might consist of guides, reviews, and “how to” posts.

5. EBooks – An eBook is usually someplace around 10,000 words long, but don’t let that frighten you. Think of it as just 20 short blog posts. If you write 20 short blog posts about the same topic, explaining how to do something, you can make them into an eBook.

6. EReports – Usually 2500 words at least and up to 7500 words, an eReport usually covers some basic educational information about a topic as well as solutions for problems that the audience may have.

7. Social Media Blurbs – When you promote your blog posts, eBooks, eReports and other content, you’ll need a social media blurb. Make them different for each network to make it unique and original.

8. Videos – Creating regular videos for your website or blog and putting them on YouTube is a great way to get more views and create more content. Videos are shared more often than text content and have potential to go viral.

9. Testimonials – Asking your customers and clients to provide testimonials is a great way to get content on your website that you did not create. The testimonials will mean more if you provide links back to the person’s site who gave them, plus come straight from them without editing.

10. Product Reviews – When you recommend products, why not do a full product review? It’s a great way to get more content, as well as to promote a product you like. Be fair about the products and be forthcoming about how you obtained the product and that if they buy it you’ll get a commission.

11. Podcasts – These are audio files and are great for those of your listeners who like to take the content on the go.

You can create these types of content by repurposing content that you already have. For example a “how to” blog post can become a “how to” video. Several blog posts on one topic can become an eReport, or an eReport can become an eCourse – it just depends on the topic. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and break things up.

The fact is, blogging is a very important tool for marketing any business today. Not only can blogging build a business, it can also become a business. Blogging is essentially writing articles about a particular topic of interest based on the subject or niche of the website where the blog resides. But it does so much more and there are so many reasons to keep blogging.

1. To Tell Your Brand’s Story – Blogging is a simple way to tell the story of your brand through case studies, historical information, and by sharing data. People love reading about how you got started and why.

2. To Establish Expertise – If you want people to realize that you’re an expert in your niche, blogging regularly about the topic is an excellent way to do so. If you can blog three to five times a week about a niche, you’re obviously an expert.

3. To Attract New Clients – Blogging about what you do, why you do it, and how you do it will go far in creating new opportunities for getting more clients. Even if you feel as if you’re giving away all the information free on your blog, people who need the work done will still hire you.

4. To Improve Your SEO – Search engine optimization involves many factors, but one is on-page keywords that help search engines find your blog in order to send people to it who use those words to find information.

5. To Find Your Business’s Voice – As you talk about new products, services, or other issues within your niche, you are also creating a voice for your company that will carry it forth to new customers. If you’re excited about a product, your audience will be too. If you’re serious about it, your audience will be too. It’s all in word choice.

6. To Interact with Your Audience – Many people do not think of a blog as social media, but it really is. When you open up comments to your blog, it gives you a chance to interact with your audience based on the topic you want to discuss. Use that opportunity to get feedback and even for new product ideas.

7. To Use Resources Wisely – Most businesses have limited marketing budgets, and blogging uses that budget very wisely due to the amount of return you can expect on your investment. Blogging is the long game, and the blogs you post today will still be working for you a year from now if you plan appropriately. It’s all about momentum.

8. To Educate Your Audience – Blogs are an excellent way to educate your audience about problems and issues that affect them. Plus, it’s a simple way to get out news regarding solutions that you want to offer them.

Blogging will build your business faster than almost any other activity, especially if your business is an online business. If you’ve studied your audience enough to understand what they want to read, and blog as often as possible, you’ll create a lot of momentum in your business and your blog.

Every business today needs online content to help market and promote the business. The best way to do this is to ensure that you have a plan for your content based on the products and services that you offer. Once you set up an editorial calendar it will help you come up with content on a regular basis. There are several ways that you can save money on content.

* Hire a Writer – That might sound like you’re spending and not saving, but a good content writer can be a life saver. If it takes you an hour to write one blog post, and you could earn more doing other work during that hour, it only makes sense to let a writer do it for you.

* Buy and Use PLR – Private label rights articles are very useful to use and very inexpensive. If you choose well, you can use PLR for a lot of your content. When you use PLR it’s important to update it and change it around to make it your own first, but that will take minutes to do.

* Write It Yourself – If you think you can’t write, you’re wrong. If you know a topic well, you can write about it. Just write how you talk, and act like you’re just telling someone who would be interested the information. In fact, using voice to text on your computer might help you.

* Repurpose What You Have – Every piece of content you create can be used again; you will just need to change it up a little bit to use it in other places. You can use a blog post in a newsletter, compile them together into a book and more.

* Refresh and Update What You Have – This is a little different than repurposing in that you will take older content that has what is now wrong advice, due to changing technology and so forth. Updating it will make it new again.

* Curate Content – In addition to your own content it’s important to tell your audience about other people’s content by curating content. The way that works is that you find excellent content that would be of interest to your audience, write a short blurb about it, add in your thoughts and link to the content.

* Make the Most of the Content You Have – When you already have content, you can make the most of it. Turn a blog post into a video. Turn a data-centric blog post into an infographic, turn several newsletters into an eBook – if you keep a plan in place it will see as if the content you have multiplies.

* Mix It Up – As mentioned, creating different types and forms of content is really a great way to expand how much content you have. A newsletter becomes an eBook; a blog post becomes a video and so forth. Use many types of content to keep your audience’s interest.

* Promote Your Content – Promote each and every piece of content that you spend time creating. If you aren’t willing to promote it, then it’s probably not that good.

Creating content is one of the best ways to market your business inexpensively. Saving money on the content that you create is essential because you need so much to stay in the game today. But, it doesn’t have to break the bank to be effective.

Sometimes bloggers get so tied up into the idea of earning money that they forget the entire point of their blog. They forget to consider why they are writing any one blog post. Your why for each blog post is probably one of the most important aspects of blogging. If you take the time to plan your blog posts in advance based on season, events, and product promotions, it will help you remember why you are writing any one post.

* Know Your CTA – If you start your blog post with understanding what the call to action will be, you can better stick to the why of the post. After all, the entire reason for writing the post is the CTA.

* Consider the Introductions – It can be helpful to write your introductions after you’ve written the body of the blog post. The reason is that you can use the intro to foreshadow what they’ll learn later, which can help keep the reader’s interest.

* Plan Out the Entire Post – Outlines are good. You may not think so yet because you may feel like you’re in school, but an outline can help you remember to put everything in the blog post that needs to be there. As you make the outline, the point of the post becomes super clear and you’ll be able to highlight that “why” easier.

* Include Humor – Depending on your audience, you can choose to include various types of humor in your blog post. You may need to go into the blog post to add in the humor after you’ve written the meat of it, and that’s okay, but a little humor can encourage your readers to keep reading.

* Add Images – Images help promote the meaning of your post in a way that just words can’t. But, before you choose an image you should absolutely understand the why of your blog post. Is it to promote a product, educate your audience about some facts, or to motivate some other action like sharing, joining your email list or something else entirely?

* Give the Headline Thought – Sometimes a headline or title can help you figure out the direction of the blog post. Some people write their headline first, other people write it last. Writing something for a headline first can help you orient the blog post in the right direction. You can always perfect it later.

* Remember the Conclusion – After you’ve written the meat of the post and the intro, and added images and humor, don’t forget to add a conclusion to the blog post. Conclusions are where your CTA usually resides and where you’ll encourage sharing. It’s often where the entire point of the post lives too.

* Edit with the Goal in Mind – Once you think you’re done, go back and edit the blog post with the goal in mind. That will help you fix any problems with the post, add in relevant keywords, and make everything stand out more so that the reason why is apparent to the audience.

If you make a point to do these things every time you create a blog post, you’ll be able to know why you’re doing it before you even start writing. Knowing your why in everything you do is going to be very helpful to you when creating effective content for your blog.

Scaling content creation enables you to get the most out of the content that you spend money, time and resources on. Plus, it allows you to pad that with other people’s content to bring to your audience a plethora of content that adds value to them and helps them to make purchase decisions.

Use Curated Content

Collect content that you believe your audience will be interested in as well as content directly about your brand that you did not author. Include content that is about your niche, and not your brand directly, and other topics you feel that your target audience will find educational, useful, and valuable.

* Share curated content – Be sure to share this content as heavily as you do your original content in order to keep your audience engaged and informed. The great thing about curated content is that it enables you to participate in discussions across the web. It adds interest of your brand by those authors and allows you to impress your audience.

* Know your niche – To properly curate content it’s important that you understand your own brand and niche enough to choose the right content to curate. Plus, it’s important to always give the right attributions and credit to the original author. Never post the content to your website. Post a small blurb, your thoughts and point of view about the content and a link to the original source.

Repost Original Content

It costs a lot of money, time and effort to create content for your niche. You need content for everything, and every platform and every form, and you need it on a regular basis. If you’re not repurposing and reusing some of your content, you’re not getting the most out of your investment.

* Share more than once – Sharing new content on social media needs to be done more than once to ensure it gets maximum views. With the way social media works, on a feed system it is likely only a very small percentage of followers, or likes, will see the share more than once, or even once. Share each new addition to your content at least three times a day.

* Use older content – Alternatively, if an issue comes up that the old content piece answers then go ahead and share it again, even if it’s months old. It’s also okay to update the content first to be more relevant if any part of the original piece is out of date. As long as the content is relevant, original, and makes sense at that time, share away.

Use Multiple Platforms

You probably are part of many different online communities and networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook groups, forums, groups and so forth. Make sure to take advantage of this fact. While it’s true that some of the audience will be the same on each network, if you find a fresh way to share the same content throughout all these platforms then you can share the same content.

* Edit for network personality – The important thing to do here is to be sure to craft each message a little differently for each network. For example, you might want to share the content in a more visual way on Pinterest than you do on Twitter. Plus, each network has a different personality. Make the content fit the personality of that network for best results.

* Use different formats – This is just repurposing content, which you hopefully already do. A blog post becomes a slide share, becomes a video for YouTube, and becomes a podcast for iTunes. It really is that simple to reuse your content. After all, the format doesn’t change the research you’ve already done. You’re just changing the format and sometimes the mood of the research to participate on multiple platforms.

A lot of work goes into creating the content that you use to market your business. You may as well get the most out of it by repurposing it for multiple channels.

The key thing about community relationships is that the more you communicate with them in a useful, honest, and direct manner, the more trust you will build. And the more trust that you build, the larger the community will become.

The people in your community are prospects who, given time, can become customers. The way to communicate with your community is to keep content coming regularly without driving them away.

Communication Isn’t a One-Way Street

Communication takes at least two people; the person delivering the message and the person receiving the message. When it comes to online relationship building, both parties can trade in their roles, but it always takes two-way interactions – not just broadcast delivery. The way to ensure that you remember that is to always respond to comments, and seek ways to interact with your audience.

Have Real Conversations with Your Community

Letting go of your agenda (to make sales) and entering into free conversations with your readers on your blog or social media is important. Strategically you’ll want to try to keep these conversations public so that others can benefit. Remember, this conversation is not only useful to the person you’re talking to, but also to the people reading. It’s also good for SEO to have more user generated content.

Personalize Communication to Help Them Feel Special

Personalization via email marketing is simple because you can set up automation to help with that. And you should, because it works. Personalization in communication on social media is a little harder because you’re going to have to ensure that you get their name, and respond to them in a personal way. Using their name and when possible tagging them so they will see your response will help.

Show Your Fans Behind-the-Scenes Information

Outside of calling out people by name, another way you can endear your community to you is to give them some personal insight into your business behind the scenes. If you’ve failed at something, or didn’t do something as well as you wanted, say so. If you have already written a blog post about something they are asking about, answer them, but link to that old post too. When they see the effort you’re taking for them, it will build a lot of trust.

Ask for Audience Participation

You can ask your audience to upload images, memes and even videos around the topic in question. For example, if you’re trying to promote exercise habits to desk workers, you can ask that they share pictures of their stand-up desk or exercise area or even start a “Fitbit” community to help encourage moving during the work day. The audience participation is key and will build trust, which is crucial to making sales.

Link to Fitbit – http://www.amazon.com/Fitbit-Wireless-Activity-Sleep-Wristband/dp/B00BGO0Q9O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424560859&sr=8-1&keywords=fitbit

Plan a Competition in Your Community

Depending on what you’re promoting, you can plan different types of competitions. For example, if you’re building a Facebook Group, you can offer random prizes to members who bring in more appropriate members to the group by using a tagging system so that you know when your group is shared. In addition, you can give out random gifts for shares.

Host a Q&A session on Facebook, Hangout, or Some other Method

Q&A’s are very popular and ways to build camaraderie with your community. They are fun too. You can use many free software programs to do it such as Google Hangout On Air, or you can use paid webinar software like GoToWebinar.com and even charge a small fee to cover costs and control how many people show up. This is a great way to prime your community and weed out customers from prospects – not to mention add them to a mailing list.
Link to GoToWebinar – http://www.gotomeeting.com/online/webinar

Automate Carefully by Planning Both Scheduled Content and Live Content

Pushing blog posts to your social networks is great, but that will only go so far if you’re not doing it in a personalized way. Automation is useful but if it looks automated (because you don’t include an interesting blurb or quote from the content you’re sharing, or answer and respond to comments on the social media), your chances to build community will be scarce.

Remember that building community means having more prospects and more customers. But, you’ll need a wide range of content types in order to do it. Every time you post something on social media, it’s content. Every time you post an article on your blog, it’s content. Content is everywhere, and it should be. Use it to its best by making it interactive.

The wonderful thing about blogs today is they don’t have to be boring and only include text content. You can get creative and include all kinds of content on your blog. The more types of content that you include, the more interesting it will be for your audience. They’ll want to read more, engage more, and even buy more when you have more creative content.

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* Video – You can easily create videos using your webcam to educate your audience, or software like Camtasia to record your screen to visually teach your audience how to do something or to go through a slide show. Video brings a brand-new element to your blog that is truly unsurpassed in opportunity.

Link to Camtasia – https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html

* Audio – Podcasts are super popular; people love downloading them and listening to them later in the day or when on the road. You can turn any blog post into a podcast by recording it using software already on your computer.

* Infographics – An infographic is a pictorial depiction of data put together in an interesting way. Most infographics are fairly long and can include a lot of data. If you have any data-centric blog posts or informational articles, consider making them into an infographic.

* Memes – Use beautiful imagery, quotes, facts and data to create pictorial images that are about 350×350 pixels depending on where you use them. You can put them on your blog; share them on social media, and more.

* Guides – Longer blog posts that are very complete guides to something are very popular, and will increase the authority level of your website. These are very long blog posts with a lot of information links to other information on and off your website.

* Reviews – Anytime you’re not sure what type of content to put up, try doing a review. There are likely books within your niche, movies, educational programs, info products and more that you can easily do reviews about. Be honest, include images, and disclose how you came by the product you’re reviewing.

* Interviews and Webinars – Believe it or not, interviews, webinars and other recorded events can become content for you on your blog. Record, cut it into shorter versions, transcribe it, make infographics to support it and you can create a lot of content out of one interview, webinar or hangout.

* New Formats – When new formats come out for content, include them in your content mix. Mixing things up and making things look a little different will go far in keeping the interest of your audience.

Blogging is lucrative, fun and interesting. You can make it even more wonderful by being creative in the types of content you include on your blog. As long as the content fits your audience, go ahead and include the type, and be creative with how you present the information.