Virtual Event Success

I’ve been having a content problem.

I write articles online, I write blog posts, and I write articles for my weekly e-zine. While there isn’t a shortage of content, I was becoming overwhelmed trying to write content for all 3 areas.

I want to provide premium content to those subscribed to my e-zine. I wanted to reward those who took the time to give me their email address with content they couldn’t find anywhere else. However, coming up with original content for my e-zine each week was becoming a huge burden given that I was already writing high quality content for my blog and for articles I submit online.

So here’s a strategy that I started to employ that helps me generate content for online article banks, my blog and my weekly e-zine without becoming overwhelmed.

Publish all your content on your blog. Everything. Focus all your writing energy on your blog. If you’re blogging more, you increase traffic to your blogsite and you start to raise your visibility. Try to update your blog with new content once every 2 or 3 days.

Then, for your e-zine, take one of your blog posts and make it the feature article in your e-zine. However, do not publish the entire article in your e-zine. Instead, give an excerpt, say the first 3 or 4 paragraphs, then provide a link near the end that states:

“Click here to read the rest of this article and to provide your comments.”

All your blog posts will need to include your resource box, 2 or 3 lines that tell people who you are, what you do and a freebie that you’d like them to download.

Two people who do this really well are Kendall Summerhawk and Melanie Benson Strick. If you subscribe to their e-zines, you’ll notice that both of these ladies follow this format. They provide a small excerpt of the article in the body of their ezine, then they invite their readers to go to their respective blogs to read the full article.

I really like this strategy as it enables your readers to comment on the article and they get to meet other people who are subscribed to your ezine. It’s like you are building a small community on your blog and allowing your readers to finally get a chance to meet each other.

So if you are publishing a blog, publishing articles online, and publishing a weekly e-zine, you can cut down on the amount of time it takes you to prepare content for these three areas by following this format:

1. Publish all content to your blog.
2. Choose one article from your blog to publish in your weekly e-zine.
3. Provide an excerpt of the article from your blog in your e-zine, preferably the first 3 to 4 paragraphs.
4. Then, direct the readers of your e-zine to your blog to read the rest of the article and to leave their comments.