But what many people do not realise is that you can reuse content by repurposing it in many different ways so that you can get a lot more out of the time and effort you put into creating the original version.

Here are some of the most effective ways that you can recycle a simple web article to make it go further.

Press releases

Online press releases are quite similar in form to articles, and this means it can be quite simple to convert your article into a press release once it is written.

Press releases should focus on a newsworthy item, so your article may need a bit of rewriting in order to work. However, because the time has already been invested in coming up with the ideas this can be a very quick and simple way to take your content further.

Video

Once you have your article completed, break it up into its most important sections and then use these to create a video around the points.

Alternatively, you could simply read out the content in front of a camera and then upload your video to YouTube.

Presentation

By using presentation software you can break up your article into short sentences and bullet points and create a presentation around it. You could then upload this to a presentation sharing site or convert it into a video.

Podcast

You could read out your article to create an audio version which you could then turn into a podcast to download. Alternatively, you could use the article as the basis for a recorded discussion around the topic.

Convert for social media

Using arguments and ideas from your article, you could break it up into bite-size chunks and then use these on your social media platforms.

For example, you could post a number of comments to your Twitter stream all on the same subject as the article, linking back to the article for the full information.

Create smaller articles

If you create a long piece of content then it should not be difficult to break this up into a number of shorter articles. You may need to do a bit of rewriting, but the shorter articles may then be ideal for posting to your blog or in forums.

Expand the reach of your content

Rather than creating a single piece of content and then leaving it in its original format, repurpose that content by following the above advice and you can make it go a lot further and help it to get in front of more potential targets.

If you need help then at Speedie we know how to create original content and repurpose it to make it go further, so just get in touch to find out how we can help.

There are a number of things that you are able to do which may improve your chances of getting your content found and read.

Here are some of the main ones which you can start to do right from the start.

Write engaging, interesting content

No one wants to read your blog content unless it is interesting and engaging. You can help to make your content engaging by writing in an informal style and by writing in short sentences and paragraphs to break the text up on the screen and make it more scannable.

You may also want to spend a lot of time thinking about good ideas and angles for your content to make it original, and this may help it to get shared more easily.

Set up an RSS feed

Even if you write very engaging and interesting content, there are still things that you can do to help to get it noticed.

One of the most important things may be to set up an RSS feed. This is a feed of all of your new content which people can easily sign up to, and then they can access your content via an RSS reader service like Google Reader so that they do not have to visit your website all of the time.

People access content in different ways, and the fact is that once a person visits your website they may forget to return again. With an RSS feed you can make sure that your content continues to reach them so that they do not forget about you.

Add social media plugins

Now that social media has taken off in a big way, you ignore this at your peril. If you write a really good bit of content then this may even go viral if enough people share it across their networks.

To make it easier for people to share your content, you may want to include social media plugins which allow your blog readers to share your content with a single click of a button. Making it easier for them to share may lead to more shares, and therefore more people coming into contact with your content.

Spread your content far and wide

These are just a few of the ways that you can increase the chances that your blog content will get shared further and be read by more people. Try to use a number of these tactics to share your content, and always be on the lookout for other ways to get it in front of more people.

Alternatively, we can help you maximise the benefits of your blog content, so feel free to get in touch.

Video content has exploded in recent years, and all signs indicate that it is only going to get even bigger as technology continues to improve.

One of the best ways to start your video marketing campaign is to set up a YouTube channel for your business, and the site makes this very easy to do.

Simple set up

The first thing that you need to do to set up a YouTube channel is to sign up for the service if you have not done so already.

After you have done this you will have to make your first important decision: your username.

Your username will become the name of the channel, so it may be a good idea to use your company name to improve your branding.

Once you have signed up, you are automatically given your own channel. However, you do not want to leave it in this standard setting, and instead you should customise your channel to convert it into your company’s personal space on the site.

Fill out all the relevant information

You are given the opportunity to provide all the relevant information about your company and your videos when you edit your profile.

Here you could include details about what you do, your experience, how you can help and what you are trying to achieve with your videos.

You can also choose whether you want to allow people to comment on your videos which can be a great way to improve interaction, just like with your company blog.

Create a unique design

There are plenty of design options when it comes to personalising your profile, so spend some time playing around to find a design which is right for your company image.

Try as much as you can to make it look unique so that it becomes recognisable as your own space on the website.

You should also consider including a company logo or other images in your extended profile as this can help to personalise it even further and make it instantly recognisable.

Add location details

Many people use details of location when making a search in YouTube just as they do in a search engine, and you can add these details to your profile when you set it up.

This can help more people to come across your channel when they make a search on the site, and can potentially lead to more customers.

Add an external URL

You have the option of adding an external URL to your profile, and this is where you should provide a link to your company website.

This will allow people to click through to your website to find more of your content, and this is important if you are trying to grow your customer base.

Add your videos and get going

When you start to add your videos, you can choose how you would like them to appear and in which order. This could be useful if you have a series of videos that you would like people to see in a particular order.

Once you upload a few videos you are ready to go, and now you can start to see how many views you attract and start to boost your presence on YouTube.

The content of any websites is one of the most important factors to consider, and some would say that it is even more important than the design of the site. After all, it is the content which builds trust and convinces visitors to become customers.

Unique, keyword led copy also attracts the search engines, helping to improve your page ranking and driving more traffic.

So where do you start with the content?

Create the foundation pages

The foundation pages consist of the home page, the about page, a contact page, an FAQ page and your insurance product pages.

The home page is perhaps the most important because this is typically where visitors will arrive first of all, so make it as compelling as possible and provide a reason for them to explore the site further.

With the product pages, create a new page for each separate product that you provide. This improves the navigation and also helps with your SEO when you are choosing your keywords.

Extra pages

Aside from the main pages, you may want to include extra pages to make your site even more interesting to visitors.

Articles providing tips, advice and insurance news are very good ways to keep your visitors on the site for longer. One of the best ways to include such content is to start up a blog, which makes it easier to post content on a regular basis and keep it in order.

You can add as many extra sections as you can to your website, so get creative and see what you can come up with. For example, you may want to provide some more detailed pages on the importance of insurance or how to set about making a claim.

Keywords

Always write your content with keywords in mind to improve your odds of getting found in the search engines.

SEO requires more than simply writing keywords into your content, but onsite SEO is still very important and you should always have it in mind when you create a new page of content.

Try to focus each page or blog post on one or two keywords for the best results.

Writing style

Remember when writing content for your insurance website that you should write in short sentences and paragraphs, and break the content up with subheadings and bullet points. This makes the content more easy to scan and therefore more readable by people sitting in front of computer screens.

Start creating content for your site

Creating content can be a challenge when you first launch your website, but effective content is the key to a successful site and it therefore requires some time and effort put into planning how you will set about writing it.

If you cannot seem to find the right words then just get in touch and we’ll come up with something for you.

Now there are many opportunities for businesses to take advantage of this to reach their prospects and carry out effective marketing in different ways

Not only can you use videos on websites such as YouTube to spread the reach of your content and increase the chances that it will get found, but some people simply prefer to engage with video content.

For that reason it makes perfect sense to look into this form of content. But how do you start to create your own videos?

The relative ease of creating content

Creating video content does not need to be overly complicated, and you may find that you possess all of the tools already to create professional looking videos.

All you really need is a digital camera and some basic editing software which is often included free on many computers.

In fact, you may not even need this much. Many smartphones come with the possibility to create and edit videos without even needing a camera or computer, and from there you could easily create videos of a high quality.

What to create?

The main problem is not the actual creation of the videos themselves, but getting ideas for the content.

Luckily, there are a huge variety of video ideas that you could choose to look into, some of which may be more suitable for your company than others. These could include:

• simple presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint;
• reviews of your latest products;
• mini documentaries surrounding the latests industry events;
• videos from inside the office to introduce the staff;

Rules to remember

There are no set rules when it comes to creating your own videos. However, it could be a good idea to remember to create videos which are engaging, personal, useful, interesting, humorous or insightful.

Essentially, try to ensure that they are relevant to your target market and that they have value. That way you will continue to attract your targets back to watch more videos and build trust with them.

Start experimenting with videos

Videos have so much potential that it really is a good idea to start experimenting with them. If you do not know how to get started creating the content, or if you are concerned about making sure your video gets seen by as many people as possible, then we would be happy to give you a head start.

Even if you have some great ideas and you have done lots of writing in the past, writing for the web is very different, and blog writing has a few unique features which you may want to learn before you get stuck in. Alternatively, using the services of online copywriting specialists such as ourselves, is an option.

Here are a few of the most important rules to remember when you start to write for your blog.

Use short paragraphs and sentences

People read screens differently to how they read paper. They tend to scan and jump from place to place rather than reading all of the content.

For that reason, it is good to create content that can be skimmed over, and using short sentences and paragraphs to break up the writing is one of the best ways that you can go about this.

Subheadings, bullet points, highlighted text

In the same way, it is also important to make use of other features to break up the content. Subheadings are a very good way to do this because they allow the reader to pick out the parts of the blog that they want to focus on, and a page split up into different sections is less intimidating for the online reader.

Bullet points are very effective because people are automatically drawn to lists, and you can help to emphasise some of the key points in this format in order to make them stand out.

Emphasised words may also be effective in highlighting important parts of the content, but do not go overboard here because it can start to put readers off otherwise.

Keywords

Writing with keywords in mind is a good habit to get into when writing your blog content.

Try to focus each of your blog posts on one or two keywords at the most, and then make sure that you fit them into important places such as near the beginning, in the title, near the end, in subheadings and wherever they fit in naturally.

This will help to provide you with a boost in the search engines over time which may help you to attract more visitors.

However, don’t overuse the keyword – getting the balance is key. Otherwise, search engines could view your copy as spam and this could have a negative effect on your blog and / or website.

Write content that engages

These are all good things to remember when you start to write your blog content. One of the most important things of all, however, is that you write content that is interesting and which engages the reader. If the content is boring then you may find it hard to keep anyone reading it no matter how well it has been formatted to the online writing style. Again, we can help, so please feel free to get in touch.

However, generating content can be hard work. Coming up with ideas and angles is not easy, even when you are an expert in your industry.

For that reason, there are a number of tools you can use within LinkedIn to help you to get ideas to generate content which will help you to engage with other professionals in your industry.

Answers

The Answers feature is one of the most important features of LinkedIn. Answers is a great way to find out answers to questions that you may have by directly contacting experts from around the world. But in addition to that you can use it as a way to get ideas for your content.

By searching through the questions posted in Answers, you can find out what people are asking in your industry, the sorts of things that they are unsure about, and where they would like more information. You can then use this to come up with articles, videos and presentations which answer the questions.

You can also ask your own questions and use the answers that you generate to come up with further content. You may find that lots of issues that you had not thought of are brought up by the answers you receive, and these can be excellent ways to come up with ideas.

Polls

The Polls application is another one of the important apps in LinkedIn which you can use to your advantage when it comes to content generation.

Using Polls, you can quickly carry out market research and answers to your questions right across your network and beyond.

The answers from a well thought-out poll, divided into different groups, can form the basis for a very interesting article or presentation to place on your profile and attract more visitors.

As long as the questions are relevant and the answers are interesting, you can present your findings in a number of ways and create different pieces of content based on one poll.

Another great thing about Polls is that LinkedIn allows you to easily share your poll across Facebook and Twitter, or to embed it on your website by simply pasting the code. This means you can take your content further and get it in front of even more potential customers.

Create engaging content for your profile

If you are having trouble coming up with ideas for your content in LinkedIn, make use of Answers and Polls. These are excellent tools, and they can really help you when it comes to thinking up good ideas for content which will enhance your standing on the professional social network. Alternatively, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Figures published last month from the Office for National Statistics showed online sales in the UK hitting £527m per week. Yet – according to an article on the BBC website* – this figure could be double if businesses made sure there were no spelling mistakes on their website.

Jason Hulott, Director from Speedie Consultants, says: “Your website is your shop window, and first impressions count. If people see bad spelling or a general lack of attention to detail on websites, it can lose businesses sales, as it makes them look less credible. People already have enough worries about online security, and a website that appears less professional, due to typographical or grammatical errors, can be a real turn off.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are a small business or a big brand, bad spellings on a website can have a huge impact on a business. With potentially literally millions of pounds being lost in revenue each week, website owners need to go back to basics and make sure that their copy is error free”.

“We currently provide over 1 million words per month of web content to clients and it might be better for your revenue stream to have your copy written by specialists such as ourselves.”

*BBC News, 14 July 2011

• Can you easily add new content to your website when you want to?
• Are you getting enough traffic to your website from non paid traffic sources?
• Does your website allow you to interact with clients and potential customers via social media?

If you  answered yes to any or all of these questions, then well done. I think you might want to stop reading this article and read some of our others.

If you answered no, then it might be a good opportunity to revisit your website with a view to “upgrade” it to make sure that it is working as hard for you as possible.   Adding new relevant and unique content to your website in a timely fashion is a great way to give people stuff to read, and gives Google something to get its spider teeth into.  The more content you have, the more opportunity you have to attract visitors.  That said without an easy way to add content, it can be difficult to motivate yourself to write stuff – only for it to sit with IT for a week or so.

Having a website that is easy to read by Google and one that Google knows exists is a good way to turn a site from a loss leader into a money maker.   And the good news is, it can be something as silly as rebuilding your site on a new platform or content management system that allows you site to be used by Google. Some functionality on websites from three or four years ago might have been good then, but now could be causing you big problems.

Finally, the buzz of social media is becoming so loud it will be deafening soon.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other services allow your potential clients to hang out and you need to interact with them on their terms.  You need to make sure your site allows poeple to share content, interact and have a dialog with your either on your own website or with the social media environment – which may be a choice they make.  New research by YouGov* shows that people want to use social media to find finance and insurance deals as well as be educated about product information, yet the feel there is a distinct lack of this kind of infor available.  Filling this need could be a great way to really improve the performance of your Internet Marketing strategy.

If you look at your website and see something that is letting the side down, you really need to think hard about a refresh.  After all, you wouldn’t tolerate a member of staff giving out old information, miserepresenting your brand, and generally sitting around doing nothing. You would replace them, or read them the riot act.

In Web terms, a replacement or a website refresh is not as costly as you would think and now is a great time to look at your whole online strategy. 

* http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nma.co.uk%2Fopinion%2Findustry-opinion%2Fanalyst-speak-financial-service-providers-failing-to-serve-a-keen-social-audience%2F3026775.article&h=a1b27