Achieving rapid and sustainable results by producing and publishing a single, large batch of content is a myth. Publishing a lot of content in a short period of time will give you little long-term success.
Many companies are excited to get their content marketing program started. This is especially important for B2B firms because content marketing is becoming the dominant marketing channel within their marketing mix. Most use content marketing to acquire new customers, while some use it to retain existing ones or establish thought leadership.
Despite its importance, you can’t jump the gun when it comes to starting your program. Publishing a lot of content in a short period of time will probably do you more harm than good.
What is the impact of creating and publishing too much content too quickly?
Companies that rush the start of their program make many mistakes. One of them is publishing a lot of content in a short period of time. Then they either significantly taper off or stop producing additional content altogether.
This approach is counterproductive. It can actually work against your program. Mechanically, here’s what happens.
A breakdown
Let’s assume that your content marketing program is new. You’ve set up your Google Webmaster Tools account, and you’re ready to go. Now, you immediately publish 30 blog posts in the span of a day. When you do this, it sends out a signal to search engines through sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.
As a result, the search engine algorithms quickly crawl your site, and they choose which pages they desire to index. Then they come back again at some point in the future (hour, day, week or longer) to see whether the level of the newly published content continues or whether it tapers off or stops altogether.
The search engines determine whether there has been a material change in the following areas:
- Breadth of content created.
- Depth of content created.
- Frequency of content created (along with the quality of the content).
These are just a few of the many “signals” the search engines use to determine the importance of a site as an authority. Sites with high authority naturally get higher preference within SERPs (search engine results pages). The higher the position, the more visitors come to your website.
With this in mind, when the bots see that the mass publication of content was only a one-time occurrence, they discount it and resume crawling your site. They do this at or near the interval established before the mass content publication.
In other words, if search engines don’t see follow-through, they discount your content right off the bat. They’ll assume it as a one-off issue. As a result, you won’t be considered as a rapidly growing company that is increasing its online presence.
What triggers should I use to ramp up my content marketing program?
The challenges of ramping up a content marketing program are not just related to the search engines. In fact, they also relate to the B2B company’s internal capacity to produce, review, publish and amplify content. Everything has to go hand in hand to achieve success. Consider these steps:
Step 1
Don’t try to publish a lot of content in a short period of time. Publishing a couple of pieces per month is a good first step for your content marketing program. You should continue at this pace until you can establish and optimize your internal content production, review and publication processes. This means that your company can regularly create, publish and amplify content. If you can do that, it represents your first milestone.
Step 2
The next step is to start publishing content a couple of times a week. Typically, this publication frequency should be enough to maintain market share against most of your competitive set. This general rule applies to most B2B industries. However, in highly competitive industry niches, you may need to publish new content daily or several times per day!
Step 3
The next milestone revolves around establishing a regular content marketing program optimization process. This can be monthly or quarterly. During optimization, your team reviews how each piece of content has performed. They also adjust your content marketing program and strategy accordingly.
Essentially, hitting the next milestone means your company can:
- Formalize the process.
- Implement it on a regular basis.
- Show success with ranking on long-tail focus keyword phrases.
Now, you are ready to scale up your content marketing program!
In summary
Don’t try to create a lot of content in a short period of time. This will not speed up your content marketing program’s success. You need to start slowly, achieve milestones based on your growth, and then optimize and scale accordingly. If you take this approach, you’ll have the maximum opportunity to achieve success over the long term.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
