There’s pressure in the content marketing world to be constantly putting new material out into the world. Build schedules, schedule posts, it’s almost as if content marketers have Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross shouting “always be posting” into their ears, berating them to produce more and more new material.
But it’s easy to lose sight of your goals, and even your audience, when jamming as hard as possible to create something new to an endlessly ticking clock. Letting the clock overtake you, letting the schedule drive you instead of the content, can lead to the dark side of content marketing. It can also lead to blog overload.
What is Blog Overload?
Blog overload is exactly what it sounds like: too much material, too similar, endlessly coming out and filling your RSS feed with post after post on the same topics. In fact, there’s a relationship to posting frequently and seeing a drop-off in your subscribers because you are “posting too much.”
With prominent bloggers already talking about posting less, it might be the time to refocus your blogging strategy and see what is key to your content. Research and create better blogs with more time between entries. Develop new forms of content to explore the boundaries of your blog. Consider guest posting on other people’s blogs. These options allow you to avoid overload and move your blog forward in new and interesting ways.
Limitation Might Be the Key
There’s a school of thought starting that limitation might actually be the key to building a more successful blog. Reconfigure your schedule so that instead of focusing on everything all of the time, you can focus on one component of your content output per day.
- Take a day for social media – maybe even divide different components of your social media plan into different days as well.
- Take a day for the latest blog post – don’t feel the need to post a multi-page article every day.
- Take a day for you – give your brain the chance to relax every day. Consider bringing a fill-in author or another writer/creator on-board to fill in days where what you really need is a break.
Taking the time to limit yourself, to break from the endless posting cycle, will allow you to reconnect with what is key in your content.
On the Other Hand…
On the other side of the coin, consider the YouTube sensation AVByte, two brothers who produce a new musical every week on their channel. In addition, they produce two other videos a week relating to that musical. Week after week, the pair pump out three videos a week to a high rate of success.
The key to their success, and how they manage not to undergo overload, is that the three videos are very different AND use material from each other.
- Monday’s video is a new musical on a different topic. These are generally shot on the weekend previous and quickly edited into a state ready for their channel.
- On Wednesdays, the channel releases a behind the scenes video, built out of the left over footage from the musical shoot. What this does is cleverly repurpose footage from the weekend shoot that might otherwise never be seen.
- It also builds more response for their Friday video, in which the brothers answer viewer questions generated in their YouTube comments. Generally, this Friday video also includes “b-roll” footage over the brothers talking, taken from the previous two videos.
This clever repurposing of material into three totally different products allows the team to stay on time for a majority of the time and has allowed AVByte to reach over 14 million views with over 100,000 subscribers checking out their weekly content.
The trick is to find a way to stay in whatever schedule you have, but vary your output to avoid the dangers of overloading not only your audience, but yourself as well.
How does your content schedule work?