While this is a laborious task, it will pay off in the long term. Understand what content is available so you can find it quickly, update it, or re-purpose it without much effort. Do an audit. Create a spreadsheet to serve as your content inventory. Organize it by channel. For example: website, Home title, page URL, headings, summary, date; About title, page URL, headings, summary, date, etc. A blog inventory might by organized by theme, topic, date, and author. Get rid of any content that no longer serves a purpose. Non-functioning content on a website page drags down the entire site’s ranking in search engines.
A company’s content should not belong exclusively to any one department or product team. It can and should be managed by content strategists who update, select channels, and put into context all created content. They can make decisions quickly and understand sources available.
Create an editorial calendar with listed topics and get necessary approvals on topics ahead of time. Once the content is approved, the content writer is ready to go when the time comes. This reduces time in researching new topics on the fly and getting sign offs.
Staff generated content can be employed as part of a company content strategy. Procedures for doing so should be simple and easy to apply. The content strategist should be well versed in what is appropriate and should serve as a central resource for questions and answers.
When there is no time to create content, share what others have created. The content strategist and anyone else interested in sharing content can find the best current articles and posts on sites such as Alltop, Technorati and Trends Buzz.
Keeping your content cycle up to speed with fresh, frequent content puts you in the fast lane to meeting your content marketing objectives.
