As a content creator, your bread and butter are supplying your audience with a constant stream of fresh and updated content. This is what will keep people coming to you. However, it can also be very exhausting because it forces you to work non-stop to feed the algorithm. More content means more views and more views mean more money. You cannot afford to stop.
Well, what if there was a better way? What if you could still put out great content for your audience while taking breaks when you need them? This is where staggering your content comes in.
In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to stagger your content for the best results while taking a break. Because work-related stress affects all of us. Whether you need a break from content creation for your mental health or because you simply need a vacation, you’ll find all the answers here.
Schedule your content to maintain your flow
Most types of content do not have to be highly detailed to be successful. A video does not have to be long for it to go viral. Neither does a blog post have to go on for multiple pages for it to resonate with your audience.
Think about your schedule. How many pieces of content do you plan to put out every week? Make it a point to have them ready the previous week. Then schedule them to go live according to your calendar.
Most platforms allow you to schedule your blog posts, Youtube videos, and social media content once you upload them. You can determine the exact date and time that you want them to be published. Take advantage of this to guarantee your audience a constant flow of fresh content. Schedule everything ahead of time and you will never have to deal with time crunches and tight deadlines.
Stagger your posts to stabilize traffic
Your traffic is going to be high or low and various times of the month. If you have been keeping a close eye on your analytics, you probably already know the exact time when most of your audience consumes your content.
Therefore, it is only sensible to stagger your content to take advantage of these highs and lows. For example, if you have a newsletter that goes out to about 20,000 people, you probably expect a traffic spike of about 1000 people visiting your site in close succession as they open your newsletter and click the links.
If the links are pointing to a particular product, service, or piece of content, the traffic surge will likely be directed toward that content. Posting a fresh piece of content at this time will likely get overlooked because the attention of your audience is elsewhere.
Publish interlinked parts or sequels
If you have a three-part video series, your audience retention will be higher as your viewers look forward to the next part after watching each video. Similarly, if you sign off a blog post with, “part two coming tomorrow” or something similar, you entice your readers and promise them that they will get a nice reward if they come back tomorrow.
Therefore, instead of publishing a single piece of content, staggering it into multiple parts will have a bigger payoff down the road. Just remember to avoid some of the common marketing mistakes as you do!
What’s more, once everything has been published, users who come in late can access everything all at once, giving them more satisfaction and building your following.
Should you stagger your content?
There is a right way and a wrong way to publish content. Some people mistakenly believe that all it takes is creating an account on all the popular platforms and publishing a few posts every few days or whenever they feel like it. This is the wrong way. It will never yield the results needed to attain influencer status on any platform.
If you want to use your content to build a brand and reach your target audience, you need to have a clear strategy place. Part of your strategy should be to encourage your audience to engage with your content and like or share it with others. This is what grows your audience.
This is where staggering your content comes in. You should stagger your content if:
- You want people to pay attention to your posts. Staggering will help with timing, allowing your posts to be seen by your audience at times when they are most likely to be browsing social media.
- Your target audience is national or international. In such cases, the best time in one area may not be the best in another area. This means you will have to post content more than once a day to ensure that it is viewed by a large number of people.
- You want your content to be fresh and interesting. Staggering your content allows you to add some variety to it. So instead of spamming the same videos or the same links over and over, your audience gets a steady stream of fresh content, keeping them engaged.
- You want to pass a specific message across. In such situations, if you do not want your posts to get lost in the crowd of competing posts, you can create a reposting schedule. This also helps when you have a social media page where you cannot realistically post new stuff every day. Instead of remaining quiet, your social profile can take advantage of older still-relevant posts by reposting them so you can get the most mileage out of them. You can schedule your content to be reposted a few weeks or a few months down the line.
Benefits of staggering your content
Helps you avoid being flagged for spam patterns
Social media, Youtube, and Google algorithms evaluate thousands of data points on every aspect of your page, channel, or site. While no one will outrightly say that dumping a bunch of content at once is better or worse than publishing that content little by little, this may be one of the factors that affect your ranking.
These algorithms analyze everything about your platform and how it operates. They also know all the tell-tale signs of spam platforms and try to discourage them by not ranking them. For example, low-quality spam sites on Google will publish 100 blog posts at the same time to make the site look active, then they let the site sit doing nothing for a few months. If the site has not been penalized a few months down the line, the owners of these sites may use them to rank other sites by adding external links to them. Google does not view this as natural human behavior because humans will publish content organically over time. So if Google notices that a site has a similar pattern, it will probably penalize it.
Staggered content improves indexing
The more active your site, channel, or page is, the higher it will rank in your chosen platform. For example, Google will index a blog that publishes a post a day more frequently than one that publishes a post every month or so. Indexing is what gets your content in front of eyeballs. The only reason news sites have content that ranks minutes after it is published is that these sites are indexed multiple times a day. After all, they publish new content just as frequently.
Similarly, your Youtube content will appear in search results more easily if you publish new videos frequently. This also applies to social media content. Your account is more likely to be recommended to a larger user base if it is active and you consistently put out new content.
Staggering your publishing schedule on a predictable pattern will essentially train the algorithm to check your page for new content every day or every few days because it can expect to find something new every time it does. This helps you rise in rankings and puts you in front of more eyeballs, growing your audience in the process.
Staggering your content builds good user habits
No matter what platform you are on, the user is king. If you make them happy, your page will be rewarded with more users.
Think about it this way; most magazines publish one issue every month. Their subscribers expect to get a single issue every single month without fail. This is what they know and this is what they like. They subscribe to magazines expecting this. Imagine what would happen if the magazine editor decided one day to dump 6 months’ worth of issues on the audience in a single month, and then nothing else for half a year. It would be utter chaos, wouldn’t it?
Just like a magazine’s audience enjoys the predictability of a set schedule, so does your audience. Plus, the schedule allows you to work on your stuff at a healthy pace, build anticipation among your users, and have people looking forward to your content by the time it arrives.
You get to do less work
Creating quality content is a lot of work. Creating multiple posts is even more work when you’re doing it, but once the posts are ready to publish, you end up having a lot less work on your hands.
If it takes you 2 hours to create a single post, and you publish one post a day, you can save yourself 14 hours every week for a month by simply taking care of all content creation tasks for the month within one week. This frees you up to focus on other things for the rest of the month.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, staggering your content is a great way to remain relevant while taking a break. We all need to take a break sometime, right? If you need to go on vacation or do simple things like clean your bedroom for a good night’s sleep, it’s nothing to be ashamed of and good for your mental health. Staggering your content can help keep your business running during your break.
As you do, remember that it may take a while for you to find the perfect approach that works for your social media, blog, or Youtube channel strategy. Be open to experimentation and keep a close eye on your analytics to see what works and what doesn’t. Over time, you will find the right balance that will make your content creation tasks very effective.
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Have a wonderful week, everyone!
