How to Automate your Content Business

Automating content can be highly beneficial to your content business not only because it saves time and effort but it also allows you to provide the right content to the right audience at the right time. According to this recent report from Markets and Markets, global marketing automation sector is set to grow from $3.65 billion in 2014 to $5.5 billion in 2019. Automation can be applied in your content business in three areas — content creation, content curation, and content distribution. This needs to be noted that though automation can potentially automate just about everything in your content business — from content creation to delivery, it is a bad idea to let automation completely take over. You still have an important role in creating quality content.

Problems small content business owners face

Budgetary, time, and manpower constraints are the main challenges faced by small content business owners (though they are commonly inherent across any small businesses). The business of producing content can be a struggle, especially with the presence of big fishes that have deep pockets and better access to the latest technology and manpower.

Budgetary constraints

Limited financial resources can prevent any company from acquiring the latest technologies, tools, and manpower; even if these things are necessary. Many such companies operate on the basis of lean management but even then, things can be challenging.

Pressure from lenders

Many small content firms pitch business ideas to get funding from investors such as venture capitalists, banks, and other sources. This, in turn, creates additional stakeholders who tend to have a substantial say in the business, with the executive team always under pressure to produce results that please the investors. Sometimes, the business strategies need to be modified or even dumped, much to the chagrin of the original owners. Bigger firms, with a more structured strategy, are in better position to manage such pressure.

Pressure to optimize resources

Since small content businesses have lean teams and tight budgets, they have to be extremely careful about using resources such as time, technology, finance, and manpower. They have to utilize every resource more optimally. Not surprisingly, there is a lot on the plate of every employee, and that creates the possibility of work being done manually. When in fact, that work could have been done automatically.

How can automation help?

In the context of content, automation is not just about automating certain clerical tasks so that people are freed up for more creative jobs. Automation can provide substantial help to content marketing efforts by providing the right topics for content creation and delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. The contribution of automation in content marketing can be summed up in the following points.

• Small content business employees have a lot on their plate. Automation can free up workload by taking up a chunk of the tasks and do them repetitively with greater efficiency.
• Automation can provide inputs such as blog post ideas, and review comments that can be used to create relevant and customized content.
• Automation can curate and deliver to the right audience the most current and relevant content.
• Automation can deliver the right content to the right audience in the right time.

Different ways to automate your content business

Whether you write or market content, it must fulfill the following characteristics: relevance; attractiveness or catchiness, and availability to the right audience at the right time. Automation can do all that. You can automate your content business in the following ways:

Automating content creation

You can have your content automated fully or partially. For example, an automated tool can write and post your blogs without you having to spend almost any effort. But that is a bad idea because machine-generated content does not have a good chance of getting accepted. Content must always be written by expert writers. In such a case, what role does automation have? For bloggers, it is a huge task to manually search and regularly come up with current, relevant and trending topics. Automation tools can identify topics that have been having the maximum engagement levels based on keyword searches.

For example, websites like BuzzSumo generates how much engagement particular topics have been having, based on keyword searches. The image below shows which topic on the keyword IoT security has generated the maximum share.

To summarize, automation tools can provide great topics to write about but it is not a good idea to allow automation to takeover writing.

Automating content curation

For your target audience, searching for quality content amidst an ocean of information that is the Internet can be challenging. You could find out or curate the most credible and relevant information from the Internet on one or more niches and provide the information to your target audience in an organized format. This feature can be an extremely valuable offering for your readers—getting all relevant information in a one-stop-shop and not having to search the web. It is not possible to manually curate the information on a regular basis so you need to have an automated search system for topics based on how the tool has been configured.

A number of quality content curation tools are available in the market such as Pocket, Curata, Storify, Sniply, Trapit, Scoop.It, Pinterest, Publishthis and Feedly.

You can deliver curated content in a number of ways to your target audience, such as the following:

• For your blog subscribers, publish the links or URLs of websites that provide important updates or news on a particular subject or domain in a single blog post. For example, you could publish the links to websites that provide the latest news or trends on fashion.
• For your email subscribers, regularly send newsletters that contain links or URLs of websites that provide important updates or news on a particular subject or domain such as social media.

Automating content distribution

No matter how well you have created or curated content for your target audience, you must ensure that the content is delivered to the right audience at the right time. You can also develop a big email list or have millions of subscribers to your content, if it does not reach the right people at the right time, one of your most important marketing goals will be unfulfilled.

You could use in-house scripts or software, which is described below, or use quality third-party tools such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Click to Tweet or Medium.

Automating content with scripts

You can either hire third-party tools such as MailChimp or BuzzSumo to automate content or you can do the same thing by developing in-house software applications and scripts. There are, of course, both merits and demerits to this approach. You need to make sure that you have sound expertise available on programming languages such as Java or Python because the software application or script will need regular modifications and troubleshooting.

Conclusion

Automation can potentially complement quality content creation efforts and it is best not to allow automation to take over every aspect of content creation. However, automation has a bigger role when it comes to curation and content delivery.

While the benefits and drawbacks of content automation are quite clearly established, it is important to decide how to go about automation. The choice, as already stated, it’s between in-house software applications or third-party tools. Of course, you can exercise greater flexibility when you made your own tools but can you, with a tight budget and a small team, afford to allocate a lot of effort to develop and maintain such a software application? The answer is to take a middle path to balance both automation and manual effort. But it is obvious that without automation, survival is difficult in this competitive market.

Author’s Bio:

Kaushik Pal has more than 16 years of experience as a technical architect and software consultant in enterprise application and product development. He has interest in new technology and innovation, along with technical writing. His main focus is web architecture, web technologies, Java/J2EE, Open source, big data, cloud, and mobile technologies.You can find more of his work at www.techalpine.com and you can email him at techalpineit@gmail.com or kaushikkpal@gmail.com