Turn Your Email Into Website Content

I write a lot of email. There are times when I tend to over-explain things and I often find myself re-reading some pretty lengthy email messages. For the most part, I’d like to believe that the advice is well received by our clients. After explaining many topics over and over again, it occurs to me that I should be leveraging this effort as content for our website and then point people there for reference. If I wrote as much website content as I wrote email, I’d probably blow through our annual blogging goal within a week. Rather than keep writing the same email, I might as well help myself and others by putting those thoughts into our blog.

Many businesses tend to struggle with coming up with topics for blogs, so why not look to the conversations you’re already having for content? If it matters to those clients, there’s a chance it matters to someone else too.

If you find yourself explaining the same things over and over, here are some helpful ways to turn that content into an asset that works for you:

Step 1: Summarize the key points of your topic into simple bullets

For example, here’s mine:

• Finding topics to write about can be difficult
• Our customers already have questions that we can address
• Expand on those topics in order to appeal to a wider audience

Step 2: Adapt your email content for your website

A client recently suggested to me that we go through their site and “add some meta keywords”. This isn’t the first time this was suggested to me by a client and I wouldn’t expect non-SEOs to know the details around why this might be a bad idea. Despite the fact that the SEO community recommends that we stop using the meta keywords tag, there are still many marketers that believe this tag should be used throughout their site. I wrote an email to my client and outlined my recommendation as to why they should not waste their time with this effort. I outlined several reasons why using this tag would fail to help their site, and a few reasons why it might hurt. That email led to a recent blog post which I linked to just above.

Step 3: Go write the content

Last step, go write the article leveraging your email. Depending on the makeup of your team, the process here may vary within your businesses. If you’re lucky enough to have a writer or editor review and edit your post, leverage that person as much as possible. The first step is getting your initial draft down so that you can walk through the key points. Then bring in the writer or editor to help you refine. As an added bonus, hire an SEO consultant to review the content to ensure you’re getting the most SEO bang-for-your-buck without changing the meaning of the article.

That’s it! Hopefully this will inspire you to start finding website content gems within your email.