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.

The place for professionals

Whereas Facebook is a place for personal social networking where businesses also have a presence, LinkedIn is all about professional networking.

Indeed, many many professionals and companies are not active on Facebook but are very active on LinkedIn, meaning you could be missing out on some excellent connections if you do not have a company profile here.

If you run a B2B company, LinkedIn is the best place on the web to connect with other companies and professionals. It is geared towards building connections and contacts and keeping in touch with relevant people and companies which is essential for the success of any business.

Set up a Company Page

Company Pages are similar to Fan Pages on Facebook. This is your profile on LinkedIn where people can visit and find out about what you do, how you do it, who works for you, how you can solve their problems, who has recommended you and more besides.

LinkedIn profiles often show up highly in search results, so your profile could become the first thing that someone sees after making a search. You should therefore make sure that your profile presents the right image of your company.

It is very easy to set up a profile, and there is a wizard set up to help you to get everything up and running with ease. However, the more time you spend working on your profile to ensure it gets the right message across about your company, the more success you are likely to experience.

Get involved in Groups

Groups are the place to go to get involved in the discussion. Being active on LinkedIn is a very effective way of improving your profile, making contacts and demonstrating your expertise. This is one of the main features of LinkedIn which gives it the edge over Facebook.

Use Answers

The Answers section allows you to post questions and provide answers, which is a very effective way to find out solutions and to show your expertise in a subject.

You will get recommendations in this way, and if you are active in Answers you can find that this leads to a large number of recommendations and can help to attract more interest from relevant professionals and companies.

Communicate, collaborate and grow

With its wide array of features ideally suited for the B2B environment, including excellent communication and collaboration tools, LinkedIn is one of the first places you should look to set up an online profile if you run a business or are self-employed.

Of course, as with all of these things there is a steep learning curve to make the most of it, and that is where you can take advantage of our expertise to help you to excel.

Web designers charge very different prices depending on a range of factors such as their experience and the service they provide. But what may be considered cheap for one person may not be considered cheap for you. So it is a good idea to always have this in mind before you begin your search.

One thing that you may want to consider when you start looking for a website design company is what they are able to do to your website so that it increases visitor interaction.

A website which looks great is a good thing, but you may want to keep visitors on the site for longer in order to increase the chances of converting them into customers.

Here are some of the things your web designer may suggest.

Blog

A blog is an excellent way to increase visitor interaction. Through a blog you are able to provide visitors with useful and interesting information about your area of expertise, and they are then able to leave comments to interact with it.

This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve the level of engagement with your website, so when you are looking for cheap website designers it may be a good idea to ask them about designing a blog for you.

Surveys

A well-designed survey in a prominent section of your website, or contained in a blog post, is a great way to improve interaction.

Your web designer may be able to design a survey for you that is easy to use so that more people are likely to take part.

Surveys are also effective because you are then able to use the results to improve your service offering based on what your respondents have said.

Social media

Social media can be a great way to improve your interaction levels on your website. You may think that your Facebook and Twitter accounts are separate to your website, but you may want to ask your web designer about integrating your social media accounts into your website so that your visitors can share your content with greater ease.

Explore ways to improve visitor interaction with your website

These are just a few of the ways that you can encourage your visitors to interact more with your website.

When looking for cheap website designers, ask them about how they are able to help you to make use of the above features, and also ask them what else they recommend. This way you are more likely to get a site which provides greater opportunities for your visitors to interact.

By promoting your website you can help to drive targeted traffic directly to your site to increase the chances that you will convert the visitors into customers.

But what are the most effective ways to promote your website? At Speedie Consultants we focus on a number of different techniques, and these can be used individually or in combination.

SEO – search engine optimisation

SEO is one of the most effective forms of promoting your website to drive targeted traffic towards it.

SEO consists of optimising your website both on-page and off-page to help to improve its position in the search engine results pages.

By getting your site to the top of the results pages it will start to appear when people make searches relevant to the insurance products you are offering. This means that your site is appearing to them at the exact moment that they display an interest in what you offer.

PPC

PPC stands for Pay Per Click, and is a form of paid advertising which, when combined with other online marketing activities, may prove to be a very effective promotional technique.

When you make a search and see the sponsored links, these are PPC ads that companies have paid for. The company pays out a sum of money each time that someone clicks on one of their ads and goes to their website, and they do not pay if they receive no clicks.

These can also be used in the same way on other platforms such as Facebook where the same principle is applied and your ads appear in the profiles of your target market.

Although you have to pay for your ads, if enough people who click on your ads become customers, then it can prove to be very successful.

Email

Emails have been around for a long time, and they will continue to be important for many years to come.

By building a list of customers and potential customers, you can get your promotions, content and ideas in front of your target prospects on a consistent basis.

This means email has the potential to be one of the most powerful and cost-effective forms of marketing available.

Find out which methods work for you

These are just some of the possible ways to promote your website, so the best thing to do is experiment and work out which ones are most successful for you. Alternatively, give us a shout and we will be happy to give you a head start.

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.

Social networks may seem confusing if you have not yet tried them out for yourself, but there are a number of things that you can do to get started and take advantage of all that they have to offer.

Set up your own accounts

The first thing to do if you want to get involved with social media is to set up your accounts. There are a plethora of sites to choose from, but a good place to start is with the biggest: Twitter and Facebook.

These are both very different sites and your strategy will be different for both of them, so it is worth spending some time getting used to how they work, finding out where your customers are, and working out what they find interesting.

A good technique is to follow some of your competitors and see what they are talking about and which of their activities seem to generate the most interest.

Then you can use all of this information to start to form your own plan for the type of information you will publish to your networks.

One way to integrate your blog and your social networks is to post brief descriptions in Facebook and Twitter of your latest post, with a link to read it, and this can help to direct more traffic to your site.

Plugins

If you are writing a blog then it is a very good idea to make use of social media plugins. These are simple buttons that you can add to the end of your blog which will make it a lot easier for your customers to share your content across their own social media networks.

The idea here is that you can use your site visitors to share your content with their own networks so that it reaches more people who may be interested in your content.

By writing really good quality content and making it easy for your visitors to share, you can help to improve the chances that your content will reach more potential readers.

Link to your accounts in all correspondence

You may want to use every opportunity to inform customers, clients and others about your social networks.

To do this, include a link to your Twitter and Facebook pages in your email signature, on your business card, in letters and wherever you can.

Always use correspondence as an opportunity to get more people to find your social networks so that they can get access to your content and help to spread it further.

Make sure you have a social strategy

Social media may end up playing a very large role in your overall strategy, or it may just have a small part to play. But it is a very good idea to try it out and see what you can make of it because it really could help you to get more people to your site and help you to build your brand more effectively.

Remember, we are social media veterans, and can help you run and manage your social media campaign.

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.