Tony Cohn
The thing about musicians who are “one-hit wonders” is that they only have one opportunity to generate revenue from their music. Essentially, they have one chance to profit off of their work, before their song becomes oversaturated and their fame dies down. After that, for many one-hit wonders, their music careers are over.
When you begin to become a successful content creator, it is easy to fall into a similar fate as the one-hit wonder. Your apps, tools, templates, articles, videos, and songs may be revenue generators right now, but as we have seen in the cases of musicians like the Baha Men or Right Said Fred, the longevity of revenue generation on unique, entertaining, and in demand content is fleeting. Therefore, to continue to grow your visitor base, acquire new customers, and continue to generate revenue through content creation, you need to constantly work at producing content.
Maintaining consistent content production isn’t an impossible task. Along with a little research, scheduling, and structure, the five tips below can help you create a steady stream of content “hits” to help maintain a consistent revenue stream from your content:
Create a Content Calendar: Creating an effective content calendar doesn’t require that you spend tons of hours drafting an overly technical document that tracks everything that is relevant to your niche (such as the resting heart rates of your visitors). Whether you decide to create a simple Google Drive document, Excel spreadsheet, or a series of reminders in Outlook is up to you. As long as your content calendar has methods in place to allow you to know when to create your next piece of content, compare the performance of your content pieces (using channel specific metrics, such as downloads for apps, social shares for articles, views for videos), and allow you to plan your future content creation efforts, you will have an invaluable tool to help you maintain long-term and consistent content production.
Visitor Feedback Solicitation: Your visitors are happy to give you feedback on your current content and provide you with suggestions for future content pieces. All you have to do is ask! Keeping a consistent content production schedule is considerably easier when you have feedback from your visitors and have a better grasp of their needs. Therefore, we recommend that you deploy various feedback solicitation methods to gauge your visitors’ thoughts on current and future content subjects, content styles and appearances, ease of use, and other relevant content topics. Feedback solicitation can be accomplished through a variety of means, including through surveys, emails to subscribers, comment boxes on your sites, in-person feedback at trade shows, and dialogue on your social media channels.
Re-Purposing Your Content: With a plethora of tools now available for free, or of low cost, to content creators, it has never been easier to re-purpose content. Re-purposing your content into different mediums allows you to reach new audiences, re-introduce older content, shorten the content creation process, and most importantly, allows you to produce more content. A great tool for content re-purposing is VoiceBunny, which provides numerous content re-purposing services to content creators including text to audiobook and podcast creation, text translation, and video narration.
Go to Your Happy Place: Routinely producing content shouldn’t be an experience that you dread. Therefore, when it’s time for you to develop content, you should strive to make your work environment one that is comfortable, relaxing, and inspirational. For some, working at home with music blasting is a serene environment, allowing them to efficiently knock project after project out. For others, sitting at a desk in an office helps them focus and stay on task. Additionally, some content creators enjoy working til 6 a.m., while others enjoy starting their work day at 6 a.m. Working in an environment that you enjoy will minimize annoyances and distractions, let the ideas “flow,” and will allow you to most efficiently create content.
Review Your Data: Reviewing the data from your content specific analytic tools, in order to gleam insights as to what types of content to create next, is an essential task for content creators. Most web and app analytics programs can give you key insights that can be useful for future content planning, including information as to where your visitors came from, which content they were most interested in, and when they prefer to access your content. We also recommend checking these programs regularly, as frequent analysis of your data can help you catch trends in visitor behavior early and spark ideas to create new content. Checking your data at least once per month should be your goal.
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