Want to Be a Content Marketing Rock Star? Focus on Your ‘Greatest Hits’

Let’s say you write two blog posts.  The first one gets 100 social shares, and you get quite a few comments from readers saying they enjoyed the post.  The second one gets 10 social shares, and no comments.

There’s two schools of thought on how to handle promoting these two posts moving forward:

1 – Spend more time promoting the first post, because that’s the one people are reacting to.

2 – Spend more time promoting the second post, because you need to get more people seeing it so it will be shared more.

 

My strategic focus is to invest more time promoting the posts that are being well-received, and less time promoting those that are not. I confine most of the promotion of my posts to Twitter, since the ‘shelf-life’ of tweets is so short.  So it makes sense to promote the same post multiple times, since most of my followers won’t see each individual tweet.

Over time, I’ve developed a core list of 10-20 posts that I consistently promote.  In rock star terms, these are my Greatest Hits.  These are the posts that always spark shares, engagement and discussion.

An added benefit from sharing these posts consistently is that I become ‘known’ or associated with the topics of the posts. Just as rock stars become known for singing their Greatest Hits, you become known for the content you create, and the content you share. But again, you have to be strategic about it. Just because a post is popular, doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily want to share and promote it.

For example, two of the most popular posts I have ever written here are ones I almost never promote or share. Why? Because the posts are related to writing and publishing a book. I wrote these posts while I was working on writing Think Like a Rock Star because I wanted to share useful content that would help others.  The problem is, this content isn’t really helpful to companies who need help with their content strategies (my potential clients). So I don’t promote these posts because they aren’t useful to potential clients, and it was also a lesson to me on not creating content that wasn’t interesting to the my desired audience.

So if you want to cultivate and curate your best content, here’s what you should do:

1 – Identify your Greatest Hits. The handful of posts that are relevant and valuable to the core audience you want to attract.  Additionally, these posts should be focused on the core topics that you want to be known for. I would suggest picking no more than 10-20 posts.  It would be better to pick 5 amazing posts than 10 ok posts. Don’t worry if you only have a few amazing posts, over time, you’ll write more amazing posts and your list of Greatest Hits will grow organically.

2 – Analyze your Greatest Hits and try to determine why they were more popular than your other posts. What topics did you cover, were the posts long or short? Did you cover breaking industry news, or were the posts all rants?  If you closely examine these posts you can probably find a few common traits that you can utilize in creating future posts.

3 – Experiment with how you promote your posts. Let’s say you’ve written a comprehensive post on the field service industry titled “Five Ways Augmented Reality Will Revolutionize Field Service”. You were convinced that this post would be a big hit with your audience, but when you share it on Twitter, you almost never get any clicks. It might be that promoting the post in a new way would make it more interesting.  For example, there might be a key research point in the post that you should promote.  If you tweet “Companies that utilize augmented reality in field service see First-Time Resolutions increase by 32%”, you may very well see more clicks vs just promoting the title of the post.  People love research, facts and numbers. These can especially be useful to your audience, especially if you are trying to connect with businesspeople. See if there are any research findings or facts that you could use to promote your posts instead.

BONUS: If you are determined to promote just the title of the post in your tweet, you could add an image to the tweet that contains the relevant facts or numbers on it.  Best of both worlds!

 

And if you need more help on how to create and promote your content like a rock star, check out this infographic: