How to Turbocharge Your Content Marketing In 5 Simple Steps

Are you looking to save time when finding and uploading relevant, high quality content to social media?

Would you also like to improve the performance of your social media scheduling?

In this step-by-step tutorial I’ll show you how you can use Buzzsumo, Buffer, Bulkbuffer and some clever strategies to save time and enhance your social media reach, engagement and website traffic generation.

What are Buzzsumo, Buffer and Bulkbuffer?

BuzzSumo is an awesome tool that helps you find the most shared content online.

When most people share a piece of content, it demonstrates that they either like it or would like to be associated with it. Hence, Buzzsumo is a great way of finding content that your audience is highly likely to be interested in.

Buffer is a brilliant social media scheduling tool which has a ton of awesome features.

Bulkbuffer is another free tool (not associated with Buffer) which lets you bulk upload content to your Buffer queue.

Individually these tools are already great time-saving assets. You can find great content on Buzzsumo, bulk upload it with Bulkbuffer and schedule it to drip feed out over a period of time with Buffer. However, the clever bit is how you plan and strategically put together the content you will upload to enhance performance.

How will this strategy save you time?

The way this strategy saves you time is simple. You quickly find relevant content you know already performs well on Buzzsumo.

Create a variety of text files filled with descriptions and links to the Buzzsumo content, in addition to your original blogs, videos, podcasts etc.

You then use Bulkbuffer to upload these text files to Buffer whenever your content queue is running low.

Each text file uses different repurposed text descriptions for each piece of content to ensure you are sharing your content in diverse, unique ways.

How about results?

The way this strategy enhances results is twofold.

Firstly by sharing content you know performs well via Buzzsumo, and secondly by utilising the large audiences of relevant influencers you have spoken about or featured in the content you share. You can create text files that include the Twitter handles of the influencers you have featured in the content you share.

Once these have been uploaded to Buffer and shared on Twitter, the influencers will get a notification and it’s likely that a percentage of them will share your Tweet if it is a good piece of content. Although you can use Bulkbuffer to upload text & links to other social platforms on Buffer, you cannot currently tag other users. This is why we will focus on uploading Buffer content to be shared on Twitter.

I’ve been using this strategy for a while now and it’s helped me get huge exposure for my content due to big influencers such as Jeff Bullas, Social Media Examiner, Content Marketing Institute & more sharing it.

Execute the following steps to start saving time and enhance the performance of your social media marketing.

Step 1 – Collate all of your original and curated content

To start out, you need to create a text file which is filled with all of your original and curated content, this will make the following steps more efficient.

Notepad (windows) or TextEdit (Mac) are good free tools you can use to create text files. Start with original content; collate all of your blogs, guest blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, publications etc.

Format the text file as follows, for each piece of content use a new line;

[Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link]

You can use bit.ly to shorten the links to your content.

Note: Photos and videos cannot be natively uploaded through Bulkbuffer so stick to externally hosted videos and your own blogs etc.

Once you’ve added all of your original content into the text file, you need to add relevant curated content to it. To find this content, head over to Buzzsumo. Now you need to research. Type various industry-related keywords into Buzzsumo.

For example, you could try the following;

[Enter Industry] blogs

[Enter Industry] Tips

[Enter Industry] Tutorials

[Enter Industry] News

[Enter Industry] Publications

You need to try various keywords and see if the content in the search results is relevant. If it is then brilliant, if it isn’t then try different keywords or tweak your keywords.

For example, I tried searching ‘social media marketing’ and it brought up some relevant(ish) results, but not a huge amount which would provide value for my audience (see results below).

I then tried ‘social media marketing tips’ which brought up some really relevant, value-adding articles I know my audience will love.

Try to find as many relevant articles as possible, the more you find, the bigger the variety of content you will be sharing and the less time you need to invest in finding more new content.

Add the curated content to the text file in the same way as you did with your original content. Make sure you format the curated content in the same way as the original content above;

[Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link]

Step 2 – Create a variety of repurposed text files

Now that you have a ‘master text file’ with lots of original and curated content, you need to create a variety of repurposed text files. These ‘repurposed’ text files will allow you to quickly and easily upload variations of the same content to your buffer in seconds. This means your Twitter feed will offer variations of the content you are sharing.

Currently, the text file is setup as follows;

[Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link]

There are a variety of repurposed text files you can create from this format outlined below.

Hashtags

Adding different variations of hashtags to the end of your content will increase the reach of your Tweets to new online audiences.

 [Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link] [2 – 3 relevant hashtags]

Tag Twitter users who are featured in the content

This is one of the most effective strategies you can use to increase exposure for the content you share on Twitter. This strategy involves including the Twitter handles of other Twitter users who are featured in the content you are sharing.

[Featuring @FeaturedTwitterHandle1 @FeaturedTwitterHandle2 @FeaturedTwitterHandle3 @FeaturedTwitterHandle4] [2 – 3 relevant hashtags]

One example of this in action is when I shared Aaron Orendorff’s Social Media Examiner Guest Post and tagged him and posted a short video telling him how much I liked it. As you can see from the Tweet below I made his day!

@dknowlton1 @SMExaminer Wow … Thx so much! And what a clever way to get noticed. Made my day.

— Aaron Orendorff (@iconiContent) July 6, 2016

This strategy isn’t just a ‘one hit wonder’, I’ve since shared Aaron’s awesome curated Best Copywriter list using the same strategy and he’s sent me a private message telling me how grateful he is!

Tag the publication where the content is posted

This strategy is great when sharing curated content from other publications.

 [Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link] via [@PublicationTwitterHandle] [2 – 3 relevant hashtags]

Tag the author & publication

If you are sharing content from publications that publish content from various contributors, this strategy is great. Publications like Social Media Examiner or Content Marketing Institute are great examples. The Authors usually have large Twitter followings and a high influence level similar to the publications.

[Enter Content Title] [Enter Content Link] Author: [@AuthorTwitterHandle] via [@PublicationTwitterHandle] [2 – 3 relevant hashtags]

Step 3 – Check Tweets are under 142 characters

For Buffer to convert the text files into Tweets, each Tweet, on each line, must be 142 characters or less. To ensure this is the case, you can use a simple character count formula in excel.

Copy and paste all of the Tweets you’d like to check into an excel document (ensure each Tweet is in a single excel cell.

In the cell to the right of the first Tweet, enter this formula: =LEN(enter cell where Tweet is located)

For example, I have entered =LEN(D5) below;

Hit enter and drag the cell down from the bottom right hand corner of the cell (this will copy the formula for all the other individual Tweets.

You can now see how many characters are in each Tweet. If you see a value above 142, you need to reduce the text in the Tweet to ensure it is 142 or below.

If you do make any changes, make sure you copy the changes back over to the text file.

Save each text file with a file name that describes the repurposed Tweets e.g. Tagged Twitter users who are featured in the content

Step 4 – Upload the file to Buffer with Bulkbuffer

Now that you have created and saved the 4 – 5 Tweet variations in individual text files, you can upload the first one to Buffer using Bulkbuffer.

Go to Bulkbuffer, click ‘start uploading for free’ and allow access to your Buffer account.

Click the Twitter account you would like to upload the Tweets to and then upload the relevant text file by clicking ‘Click or drop a file on me to import updates’.

Click ‘Send to Buffer’.

Once there are green ticks next to each update, head over to your Buffer account to ensure all the Tweets have been uploaded.

Check that the Tweets have been successfully uploaded to the correct Twitter Account within Buffer. Finally, click the ‘Shuffle’ button to shuffle the content so that the Tweets are evenly spread between the rest of your queued content.

Step 5 – When your Buffer is empty, upload the next repurposed text file

This step is simple enough. Once your Buffer queue is empty, follow step 4 to upload the next repurposed text file.

You may be thinking that you can’t keep uploading the same content over and over… and you’re right!

This is why you should update your text files every 1 – 3 months with new, relevant content.

Note: Don’t forget to be human! I use this strategy to upload the bulk of my content, however, I send just as many human Tweets engaging with my audience – you should too!

Wrap

Time is your biggest asset, so anything you can do to save time with robotic tasks like uploading a piece of content to your social media scheduling software is positive right?

What do you think? Have you got any time-saving tips for other social media marketers?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Guest Author: Daniel Knowlton is the founder of KPS Digital Marketing and has a passion for creating and sharing step by step Digital Marketing tutorials on his blog. He is also a keen speaker and was recently named #12 Most Influential Digital Marketer on Twitter in the world in 2016.

The post How to Turbocharge Your Content Marketing In 5 Simple Steps appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.