Maintenance.

Just like children, content needs care and attention too. It needs to be told it’s good, kept on the straight and narrow, and constantly monitored to make sure it’s on its best behaviour.

Curate.

Once new content has been commissioned, created, approved and published, it will possibly benefit from some curation. Sure, it most probably has a ‘home’ within the structure of your website or app, but it may need a spot of promotion to highlight it from time-to-time.

Think of it like this: supermarkets do the equivalent by placing the special offers on the end of each isle. Those cakes being ‘flagged’ can always be found amongst the rest of the cakes, but because they’re discounted, the store wants to highlight them for added promotion.

Or, when it’s hot weather outside, the store will make an effort to showcase you all the BBQ meats and salads to tempt you into buying. Maybe that’s why you went to shop in the first place, and by putting them in a prominent position has saved you time having to hunt through the isles.

Curating content is similar, and it doesn’t just have to apply to ecommerce websites selling items. It can also apply to news – what’s the latest stories, which is editorially more significant. Curate just means to arrange to suit your audience and you in the best and most appropriate way.

Content can be curated around your list of top tasks created from your analytics – or it can be curated from your own promotional or editorial preferences.

Review and revise.

You can never just publish and forget. This isn’t the printed press you know! Your content will be active forever, save for a server failure. So people will keep looking at it all the while it’s there.

Now, that may not be a problem. Some content is ‘evergreen’: good forever and never needs reviewing. This may be because it’s been written in a particular way (removing time references etc) amongst other reasons. But not all content is so amiable.

Most content has dates and times, addresses and telephone numbers, staff names and job titles, fees and charges – you name it. Not all this content will remain accurate forever, so to keep good content, it’ll need reviewing and updating.

It should be an aim of yours to ‘always be accurate and never knowingly mislead‘ when publishing content. It serves no purpose to publish inaccurate information from day one, so it also serves no purpose to publish inaccurate information should something change 30 days after you published.

To keep on top, make sure you review all your content on a regular basis. Add updates to your content audit and keep notes in your content calendar. Review and revise.

Lifecycle.

Sorry to disappoint, but taking care of content is never over. It has an ever revolving lifecycle. It’ll need updating often, maybe every few weeks, or months, but very rarely can you publish and forget.

There are no hard and fast rules for taking care of content. Just like people, each piece created is unique. All you can do it apply a set of principles to each as best as they fit.

Prepare, plan, produce and manage. Prepare, plan, produce and manage. Prepare, place produce and manage. Get the idea? Good. If you think you can forget about all that content you’ve published, you’d be sadly mistaken.