Content Management involves many different hats but all of them play important roles in the success of your website or blog. Having great content on your website or blog is not as simple as just putting anything up and hoping people will read it. There is a whole process that goes on behind the scenes before that piece of content ever sees the World Wide Web. It’s the job of the content management team to ensure that the content that goes onto your websites and blogs is high quality, that grammar and spelling are error free, that the content is engaging and interesting and conveys the tone that you want your business to show the world.
The different roles that make up the content management process all work hand in hand to make things go as smooth and successful as possible with one single goal in mind: to post pieces of content that visitors will a) read and ideally b) share and tell their friends, family and work colleagues about it. Depending on who is handling your content management, there may be one person who wears all the hats or there may be several people that work together to get it all done.
The Content Management Process
What do you want to say?
If your business is new to blogging or posting content on your website, the team handling your content management will start out by talking to you to find out exactly what you want your visitors and customers to see when they come to your blog. The purpose of good, quality content is to ensure that what is written sounds like you, not like someone else that isn’t involved in your business. Your tone needs to be prevalent in what’s posted, and they will need to ask you some questions to make sure they understand what you’re looking for when it comes to that tone and the feel of your posts.
This is where you need to tell them what message you want to put out to your site visitors. Do you want videos? Do you want to have “techy” sounding posts or do you like to have visitors feel like they’re reading something a friend wrote to them? Don’t hold back what you are looking for in your blog posts and website content, because that is how your content management team will create a plan for your site that includes the tone of how you want things. The more they know about what you want to say, the better they can provide it for you.
Creating the Content You Want
Sometimes a business will enlist the services of a content management provider because they want content on their sites, but they don’t have time to write it themselves. Sometimes they hate to write or are just not good at it and want a professional to handle the content, so they don’t look bad to the public by having poor content on their sites. Once the team knows what you want to say and how you’d like it to be said, they can start the process of creating that content and getting it written. This will be done in one of several ways or a combination of ways, depending on the services the content management team offers.
They may have writers on staff that will write the content based on the discussions that were had with you. In other cases, they may outsource the writing to a team of writers or one writer that will write the content for them. This part of the process is really nothing to concern yourself with because the team you have hired to handle your content is well versed in whom to hire to get the content written in the best way possible that will be exactly what you’re looking for.
They will give the writers topics, keywords, guidelines and in some cases points that should be included in the article and the writer will go and write the piece and present it back to them. Once they get it back, there are several more steps that transpire before it is added to your site or blog.
Editing and Checking the Content for Accuracy
The content editor has the important job of going over the piece of content that is handed in to ensure that it is written in a high-quality manner, that it contains no spelling or grammatical errors, that the SEO optimization is correct (keyword usage and placement, etc.) and that the tone matches what you want. If there are any errors, the piece is usually sent back to the writer for revisions and this will continue until the piece is near perfect.
Depending on how involved you are in the content process, you may opt to see the piece before it is sent on through, but many businesses choose not to involve themselves in these steps and leave it up to the very competent content management team they’ve hired to handle this for them. It is up to the business owner which way they choose to go, but since many hire content management teams due to lack of time, this is not something they want to have to worry about.
Publishing the Content and Setting a Posting Schedule
Once the revisions are made and the content is ready, it’s time to post it to the website or blog and then promote it through different channels. This is the exiting part for you, the business owner, especially if you are just getting started with having blogs or content on your sites. Seeing people come to the site to read your new content will be a great thing to celebrate but everything isn’t finished yet.
Once the piece is published, the content management team will ensure that the post gets some promotion which can come in the form of guest posts with back links to your blog, social media posts with links to the full article and other means of letting your visitors and new visitors know there’s some great information on your website. There will also be ways for visitors to share your content with their friends and family through the many social media venues available and the content team will make sure that sharing is easy and quick for the visitor to do. When it’s easy to hit the share button on a great article, most people will, especially if they liked what they read and learned.
Since people love new information, the content management team will create a posting schedule for your site/blog that they will keep track of and ensure is followed. This will include how many times a week or month new content is added and also can include finding other sites, forums and blogs to have guests’ posts put on that lead back to your blog and site. Ideally, content will be added to your blog or website at least once a week, which will help your search engine rankings as well since Google LOVES new content.
It’s an ongoing process that a good content management team will make appear to be effortless, but in truth, there is a lot of hard work that goes into those articles and blog posts that you see on websites and that’s what makes them so valuable to your business.
