{!date dayname+0}, {!date long+0} Dear {!firstname_fix} How's your week been? Busy? Interesting? I've had one of the busiest weeks in ages I'm glad to say, but I'm taking a day off today. As you read this I'm at The Open Golf Championships down in Kent with my 11-year-old son, Elliot. And at the end of a really busy and frantic week (I have not spent one evening at home...!) I'm really glad I can relax and not think about work for a while. Yesterday I asked a group of people if they could break up their working week into five themes - after all, I said, you only work five days a week. "You wish," they all shouted back...! Many of us have long working hours, with people emailing at all hours of the day and night and at weekends. The "working week" is now "all week" it seems. My day out with my son is perhaps a reminder that we all need time to ourselves and to relax, away from work. That has been forced on me by The Open Golf itself - cameras are banned from the course, as are mobile phones. So even if I wanted to check my emails today I won't be able to. Rest, peace and relaxation - we don't do enough of it these days.
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED: How can I increase the value of my website content? If you are "doing it right" you will be adding content to your website on a regular basis. If you are not adding content to your website, preferably several times a week, you are missing out. All of the research shows that websites which are constantly and regularly updated are the ones that get the most interest from people and search engines. Double Whammy..! But if you add content to your website and do nothing more with it you are wasting it, significantly. Each piece of content you produce for your website - whether it is a simple blog post, or a video or something more complex like an ebook - can have a "double life". Indeed, much of your content can live several "lives" online. Imagine you have a handful of blog posts on a similar theme - all you need to do is put them together in one document, save it as a PDF and hey presto you have a little "e-booklet" people can download. Alternatively, you can take the blog posts you have written and then add a bit of background and hey presto again you have an article you can submit to a syndication service, such as EzineArticles.com. Take your blog posts on similar themes, prepare "bullet point" summaries of them on PowerPoint and yet another hey presto you have a slide deck of your content you can post on SlideShare. Play the PowerPoint slide deck in "slide show" format and record your screen and audio as you provide commentary on the slides. Next thing you know, you've produced a little video of the content which you can share on YouTube. You could even make it easier with "PPT to Video" software. All you then do is take the audio from the video, "top and tail" it with an introduction and a close and - drum roll this time - you have a podcast you can put on iTunes. You can also take your website content and convert it into handouts, printed newsletters and other physical give-aways. And if you already produce printed newsletters you can do the reverse - turning them into web content. Many businesses produce content in one form and then fail to capitalise on the use of that content in a variety of other formats. Why let your content go to waste? If you have produced it once, there is usually very much less work to do in order to get that content re-used in a variety of other ways. Some people call this "repurposing". It doesn't matter what you call it - just do it...! Take your content and reformat it, edit it or combine it and before you know it you have more content you can do more things with. Far too many businesses produce content once, for one purpose. Yet you can take content already produced and use it in so many more valuable ways.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK: Carry on - no-one noticed...! On Wednesday night I was in my son's school hall, ready and waiting to watch a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds perform "Dream On" - a "junior version" of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He had a leading role, playing Theseus - the Duke of Athens. All was going well until one of the children forget their lines and needed prompting as to what to say next. But it was a momentary lapse, he was not embarrassed in the slightest and glided over it as though nothing had happened. But then later on, apparently, he forgot his lines again. But this time, rather than seeking prompting he just started saying what he did actually remember. That, however, was half a page of script further on...! The result was the play missed out a complete chunk of dialogue and action. Because he had moved on, so did all the other children it seems, as though nothing had happened. And how do I know...? Well, only because my son told me. I had no idea a chunk had been missed out - and I suspect no-one else, other than the teachers and children, knew either. To us in the audience it all went swimmingly. Sometimes in our work things go wrong - with our website, with our email and with our presentations. We forget something, a failure of some kind happens. What do we do as adults? We say sorry - we draw attention to it..! Perhaps, like the children in my son's school play, we should just carry on sometimes because most people will never notice the minor problems if we don't draw attention to them.
THIS WEEK'S "MUST BUY": Killer Web Content  Whatever website you are involved with, there can be no doubt nowadays that your site lives or dies as a result of content or lack of it. You can, as I explained earlier, make the most of your content by producing it in different formats so that you have information available in a variety of ways to suit the maximum number of people. But that all presupposes you have good content in the first place. This book, Killer Web Content, helps you ensure you have great content. It provides solid advice on the processes of producing great content and also shows you how to choose the right words, how to create attractive headlines and how to use content to get found. If you have a website you need content. If you have content you need this book..! To find out more about this book, please visit: http://uklik.me/killerwebcontent
To get my blog delivered to you each week in PDF, Kindle or ePub format simply visit: http://uklik.me/gjweekly
Kind Regards
Graham Jones Web:
grahamjones.co.uk Tel: +44 118 336 9710 If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter than you can delete your name from the mailing list by clicking this link: {!remove_web} Affiliate Links: Some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links providing me with a small commission when you purchase the item. However, I only use affiliate links for products which I personally value. |
