Content Audits – a useful tool
Our good friend Tiana from TalkingBusiness.biz introduced us to the ‘Content Audit’ which we think is a fantastic way to keep your content in check. If you are just starting to put more of a strategy into place regarding your content, or if you have been going for a while, then it works as a useful tool.
Basically, this is what you do. Create a spreadsheet where you can keep track of every historic piece of content you have ever created. This can include anything and everything including:
– Blog Posts
– Videos
– Infographics
– Presentations
– Infographics
– Help Sheets and so on.
Literally any piece of content created, needs to go in your audit.
What you document on your content audit is going to be different for everyone business, but we would suggest the following fields as a minimum:
– Name of Content
– Category (if you can categorise your content)
– Type/Format (Blog Post, Video, Presentation etc.)
– Date Created
– Purpose (e.g. created for my presentation at…)
– Link (if the content is online somewhere)
– Shared (how many times you have shared it)
Not only is this a great way to keep track of what content you’ve got, but it is a great way to repurpose and reuse content. We were surprised when we did this for ourselves, just how much content we had, and what we could do with it!
Could you put some blog posts on a certain category together to create an eBook?
Could you reuse your videos in an upcoming presentation?
Can you tweak a presentation you have made for a different audience, and republish it?
Could you respond to somebody on Twitter or a blog with a link to a relevant article you have wrote?
Don’t feel like you have to share your blog posts once and once only on social media either. Keep a note in your content audit of how many times you have shared your blog posts, and re-post them multiple times.
Just keeping some form of organisation to your historic content is going to come in useful one day, and the content audit is the way to do it.
ACTION: Create a spreadsheet with the fields from above, and schedule in your diary right now, a time to do your content audit.
ACTION: Look at all the content you have and try to think about how you can re-purpose it.