EasyAuthoring, a Smart Content Marketing Tool for Small Business
The debate over the value of content may go on forever, and then there’s the endless debate over the finer points of creating and scheduling that content. What marketing experts agree on is clear, however: good content is extremely valuable and creating and managing that content is time-consuming. Here’s one way we help our clients strike a balance by generating quality content regularly and easily.
EasyAuthoring Enables Faster, Better Content Creation & Sharing
Many tools exist that enable sharing and scheduling of posts across social media channels. HootSuite and Buffer were early arrivals and new tools pop up regularly. Ours is a hybrid; we developed it specifically to alleviate some of the issues small businesses typically face in creating and managing content. We developed it to be both affordable and simple, a tool that would work with our clients’ existing social channels and website. We call it EasyAuthoring and it’s been in use for several years.
Before explaining how it works, we should explain a few basics about content. Importantly, all content is not all created equal.
Every marketing expert online extols the importance of creating content to attract visitors to your site, to keep them coming back (building a relationship), to help your site rank well in search engines, and for many more reasons. While this conventional wisdom is all true, writing original content is often challenging and it is certainly time-consuming.
Sharing a link to someone else’s useful online content with your own insightful comment (aka “curating content”), on the other hand, can provide almost the same value as original content, but at a fraction of the effort and time. For curated content to have significant value two things have to be true though: (1) the shared content is useful and relevant to your audience and (2) the comment shows your take / position / smarts so the audience learns about and is impressed by you.
EasyAuthoring provides a powerful interface that allows you to find useful and relevant content via keywords or by monitoring specific sites and blogs. It even has a browser plug-in that allows you to easily grab and comment on content on the fly, while surfing the web.
Importantly, EasyAuthoring avoids Google’s dreaded duplicate content penalty because the shared content is not on your site, it stays on the site where it was found. Because of this, while human readers will value the shared content and insightful comments they find in your blog, you won’t get any SEO benefit from these “short comment” posts. That’s why EasyAuthoring also has a “deep post” capability, that only benefits human readers but delivers a search engine ranking benefit too.
Why Create Deep Posts for Your Blog?
Deep posts are curated items with comments longer than ~350 words, which is enough original content that Google considers them derivative and not duplicate content. (The production Wicked is clearly a derivative of The Wizard of Oz, but since there’s so much new content, Google–and plagiarism law–sees Wicked as an independent work). Deep posts exist on your site, are indexed by Google and bring search traffic to your blog, which is how they provide an SEO benefit.
While deep posts take more time to create than “short comment” posts, they take far less time than writing original posts from scratch.
Enhancing a post’s comments (making it “deep”) also offers several benefits for prospects and customers who read your blog.
- You can easily tailor longer posts to your prospects’ interests and needs, and add links to other pages on your site, increasing the odds that those prospects will peruse your site and ultimately convert (buy).
- Curating content is a service to your prospects and customers, for example, alerting them to industry news that may be relevant to them or highlighting trends that affect your market.
- Deep posts get their own url (web address) on your site making them easy for humans to share which brings additional traffic to your site.
Smart Blogging: Balancing Time and Content
Even with EasyAuthoring, some time and planning is required to create quality content. Our clients have found that EasyAuthoring provides a perfect balance, helping make the most of their time while providing quality content for their customers and prospects (and Google).
Balance is important. Because “short comment” posts are so easy to create, Sales Renewal often recommends a content mix similar to this:
- 2-5 “short comment” posts per week on a wide range of subjects – impresses visitors, enhances your brand and provides a reason to subscribe to the blog and visit it often.
- 1 “deep post” every week (or every other week) – delivers the same benefits, plus brings more visitors to your site via organic search
- 1 original blog post per month – while they take more effort, there’s no replacement for your own content since you completely control the message and can precisely get it across at a time of your own choosing.
Thanks to the enhanced content (and added search benefits) of EasyAuthoring, visitors will come back for more – deepening their relationship with your company and moving further along in your sales funnel.
Contact us to learn more about how EasyAuthoring and other tools that can help you make better use of your time and marketing budget.
