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Three Quick Ways E-Learning Companies Can Keep Content Rolling Out — Even During Back-to-School Chaos

It’s the start of a new school year, and it’s all hands on deck for e-learning companies.

As an edtech leader, you spend the last half of August and the first half of September tending to your existing clients. You help them roll out new content. You train personnel on your tech. And you are constantly, constantly troubleshooting.

But back-to-school chaos doesn’t mean your blog can go dark.

We’ve all been guilty of it. In August and July, people go on vacation. Things are let go. Blogs can be neglected. Then the hustle of the school year sets in and it’s October before you know it.

You need to keep that content rolling out. Not only does a dead blog look uninviting to visitors (also, not having fresh content is not going to bring any new visitors) but the more you update your site, the more frequently your site will be visited and indexed by search engines.

“But I’m slammed this time of year,” you say. “I don’t have time to blog.”

Okay, fair enough. Here are three quick ways you can update your site while dealing with back to school insanity.

1.) Re-use your old content. Do you have an evergreen post? Something that was published on your blog as a Back to School piece last year or the year before, that may still be relevant? Time to make it work for you all over again.
Pull up that content and change anything that may be dated about it. If it refers to old events or offers or personnel who have moved on, delete that. Make sure the cultural references are up-to-date. (Does it reference Tiddleswift? Delete. “Uptown Funk” as the song of the summer? Plug in “Despacito.”) Add in new offers or events. Now comes the magic part.  Change the date of your post and update it. Et voila, new blog post.

2) Do a video. No time to type a post? Make a quick video. Not a slick video, just a quick one of you delivering the message you might otherwise type into a blog post. As a professional writer, I get it — blog posts take time. You have to do research, look up links, find art, make sure your words make sense. If you’re an e-learning founder, you might not have time for that right now. So decide what to talk about (answer common questions from your clients, for example, or talk about the work you’re doing to prep for the school year). You might even Facebook Live to take questions from your audience in real-time and then post the link to your blog. (Some of my colleagues are big Facebook Live-rs. Here’s more from content strategist Erin Ollila about how Facebook Live has worked wonders for her businesses.)

3) Create a round-up. Round-ups are the best. Do you regularly read about the e-learning industry? Do you spend a lot of time listening to edtech podcasts? Write a round up of the most interesting articles or pods you’ve consumed recently. What about tools you use or integrate with that your audience might find useful or interesting (LMSes, quick video creation tools, or Open educational resources, for example.) Do you have an active social media presence? Did you have a funny or informational exchange with someone recently? Tweet a story time? If it makes sense to do so, Storify that thread and present it in a blog post.

Done. You have now updated your blog and are free to return to the chaos of early September.

Let’s make sure this never happens again, okay?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? To make sure that next year, during back to school (or during graduation season, or midterms) you don’t let your blog lag, take the time to put together a content strategy. Plan what’s going to be on your site ahead of time. Write those posts ahead of time. Work from a schedule so you don’t have to worry about content when you’re crunched for time.

Need help? I’m a freelance content writer who specializes in e-learning. I can help take content off your plate so you can concentrate on your tech. Get in touch today. We’ll do a free 15 minute call to see if we work well together.

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Want Strong, Original Content? Interview Your People.

We’ve all seen it. You search for information on, a topic — say, sales enablement — and Google turns up several pieces of content from the blogs of competing B2B companies, all of which cite the same sources, and say the exact same thing.

Even worse? One or two of those posts cite each other.

Repetitive content is a cringeworthy problem, but it is an understandable one: research is  time-consuming, and overworked creators need to get content out quickly. They search the Internet for information about an assigned topic or keyword, often quoting the first article they see in their search results. (And who can blame them? A lot of those creators are also underpaid.)

It might be understandable, but it’s not okay. Shoddy research can spread misinformation, and that can damage a company’s credibility.

Luckily, your business has access to the strongest, most unique-to-you primary sources of information available: your own people.

Put your employees (and clients) in the spotlight

First-person interviews with you, your team and your happy clients are the best way to showcase the strengths of your company and your product.

What better way to talk about the strength of your product than by interviewing someone who’s used it and loved it? What better way to explain your tech then to have one of your engineers interviewed?

I started my career as a print journalist. Interviews have always been my favorite part of the job. I love talking to people and finding out why they do the things they do. Here’s one thing I’ve learned from 17 years of that work: you can tell the story of any organization, initiative, policy, or product if you tell the story of the people behind it.

Think about it: everyone associated with a business tells part of its story:

  • Developers tell the story of your tech; how it was built, and how it works
  • Your team members tell the story of the day-to-day operations of your business (you might not think that’s interesting, but prospects who want to buy from a company that shares their values will)
  • Happy clients tell a story about your product and your customer service
  • And of course, as the business owner, your story is your business’s story

All of these people have first-hand experience with your company and product, so put them in your content. Blog posts, web copy, case studies, white papers, ebooks all can be improved by interviews with your people.

From transcript to content

Interviews might seem like they’d write themselves, but sadly they don’t. Someone has to write good questions, conduct the interview, then take that interview and integrate it into your existing content strategy.  (Former reporters — and there are a lot of us in content now — are pros at this.)

Your people are a goldmine; you just need to know how to extract the wealth of their expertise, and refine it.

Want to learn more about strong interviews? I’ll be writing more about how to prep and put together a simple interview in an upcoming post.

Want strong and original content for your own business?
Contact me and get interviewed today!

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