Balancing Quality & Consistency – How To Maintain Your Audience

One of the problems with creating content is keeping people interested. If you have a lot of different content streams on your site, you’re going to have the challenge of content creation for all the various formats you output. Videos, images, blog posts or even podcasts are great – but the key to success is keeping it consistent.

We’ve all seen dud blogs, sites with sporadic content that is never consistently updated and can at times be extremely old. This is a problem. It really doesn’t do much for the user, and inconsistency in your content means that people are likely to go elsewhere – even if the content you create is of a good quality.

Content Is King, Consistency Is Queen

So why is consistency and fresh, regular, high-quality content important? Well, think of your site as a shop – you opened your shop and people liked what you had on offer – but then they try to go back again and you’re closed. It’s a very frustrating experience for the user – because in all likelihood they like what you have, but seeing they can’t go to your site and find fresh content they go elsewhere - instead of wasting their time checking your site and hoping something new will be there.

It’s all about reliability paired with quality for the user, and most successful content sites will always have new stuff available in order to keep their audience hooked. It’s hard enough to gain an audience, keeping them interested is just as hard if not harder so you need to give them what they want.

How Do You Stay Consistent With Content?

We all get a little bit busy, and when it comes to the time when you need to put some more content out it’s easy to forget – especially when there’s other work to be done. So, here are a few tips to keep regular;

1. Planning – one of the things we like to do for clients is to provide detailed plans for a certain period of time, which are essentially briefs for content to be created. It’s easy to fall into the trap of pondering what you should write about for your latest blog post – but if you create a 1, 2, 3 or even 6 month plan you will be one step ahead, and it’s a lot more efficient than twiddling your thumbs wondering what to write.
2. Scheduling – once you’ve got your content created, you can schedule your content to be published on your site, YouTube channel or any other outlet at set times. This is great because you can be completely consistent in your approach and set the date and time you release content. It’s always nice to have a buffer, because it relieves the pressure – so it’s worth creating batches of content in advance if you can.
3. Guest Posts – if you can’t take the workload of creating content and you want to ease the burden, or you need some more content to beef up your schedule, then you could try inviting guest blog posts. People love to do guest posts in order to get their names out there, and if you’re an industry leader then you should have people clamouring to give you content. The best thing about this is that you can get your content for free by offering exposure and an audience for others.

How Often?

This is a common question, and it all depends on what your platform is. If you’re on social media then you will have to post very often in order to make an impact, because things move a lot faster on social media and you are surrounded by your competitors – especially on public platforms like Twitter.

If you’ve got a blog, it’s a bit less relentless but it still has to be regular. Our old pal Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz recommends at least once a month – he says “Two times a month in terms of a great piece of content, even once a month can work out just fine”. This could be considered a minimum, if you’re capable of creating more great content each month then there’s no reason to hold back.

This brings up another point, with regards to consistency – it still needs to be very high quality. There’s no point pumping out weak, bland and unhelpful content every day – better great content less often than poor content more often.

People can get worried about the word consistency, but as Rand states “Just because you're consistent doesn't necessarily mean that you have to produce a huge volume”.

Making Sure You Hit

Of course, the best way to make sure you hit with your content is to research the ways in which people search around your particular area of expertise – and tailor your content around these search habits. By doing some keyword research you can find topics that have less competition, and therefore this will help your content stand out from the crowd.

Blogging is great for SEO and you can include things like keyword rich blog post tags, internal keyword links and also focus blog titles around keywords that you’re targeting.

There is also something to be said about social media promotion.Posting on your blog is great, but try to engage with people on social networks and push your content out there to help gain some further exposure – you can also create some fantastic reciprocal relationships on social networks

Keep Moving Forward

It’s a tough thing to do, but consistency is very important. It doesn’t mean churning out thousands of blog posts; it’s not about massive acceleration to overtake your competitors. Just keeping your foot on the gas and steadily cruising is the best option.

The real aim is to maintain equilibrium with consistency and quality that’s within your means to achieve.

If you liked this post or are interested in more content related tips and tricks, check out the rest of my contributions to the ThoughtShift Blog or follow us on Twitter @ThoughtShiftUK for all the latest digital marketing news and updates.