When it comes to the creation of content, it’s imperative that you’re getting out as much content as possible on a regular and consistent basis. The audience you’re trying to reach is not only the folks who are visiting your site but also the search engines that crawl websites.

As such, it becomes more time-effective to develop a strategy in which you take individual content ideas and multiply the content output by applying a content generation concept that we’ve coined as B.I.V.A. (rhymes with “diva”).

What is B.I.V.A.?

B.I.V.A. stands for Blogs, Infographics, Video & Audio/Podcast and represents an approach of taking any single idea and creating different pieces of content that can be used and promoted in a variety of ways.

Let’s say we’re writing about the Home Buying vertical and how lending partners are tightening their lending standards in the light of the depressed economy that started in March 2020. We could obviously do a blog about this topic but then also develop an infographic that outlines things like:

• Target credit score sought by banks pre-recession
• Target credit score sought currently
• Average number of potential home buyer credit rejections post-recession vs. current

This could then be prefaced with a paragraph or two to help shape the story followed by a “talking head” video that dictates the blog copy. Finally, the video could be transcribed and converted into an audio/podcast clip. You now have 4 pieces of content all derived from 1 initial topic.

Benefits of B.I.V.A.

B.I.V.A. does two important things.

Firstly, it addresses the fact that humans consume and retain information in different ways. Much like when we were in school, you had students who learned in different ways.

Sometimes the teacher wrote on the board, sometimes they dictated, sometimes they rolled in that old tube TV and you watched a video, sometimes there were guest speakers or hands-on projects or homework assignments or a variety of different ways to express the lesson of the day.

Secondly, this approach to content generation follows that line of thinking by presenting that one topic in a multitude of ways. You increase the likelihood it will be consumed because people will watch videos from their laptops, listen to podcasts while commuting to work, and read blog articles on their phone during downtime.

We are sending the signals that this is a vibrant and active site that always has new content. This is important because one of the aspects that the search engines look for when determining relevancy and authority is how often it is updated.

They prefer dynamic web presences over stale websites. By taking each idea and developing multiple pieces of content, we can always have something new posted either all at once or staggered over time.

In short, it’s far easier to come up with 5 subjects to expound upon and then apply the B.I.V.A. approach and create 20 pieces of content (i.e. 5 subjects multiplied by the 4 outputs of B.I.V.A.) than it is to come up with 20 individual subject ideas and write 20 blogs or create 20 videos for them.

If you already have 20 ideas, it now becomes 80 pieces of content. This exponentially increased the amount of content we can have quickly as opposed to the daunting task of new idea creation each and every time.

Before we go, we wanted to highlight 2 quick ways you can get a couple new content pieces to kick things off even if you’re not ready to implement the B.I.V.A. approach today.

Develop a glossary of terms related to your industry

One trick we love that can produce a good amount of new content would be to develop a glossary of terms that are pertinent to your vertical. There are tons of words that are specific to certain products or services that may even have a different definition when used in another context.

Here’s an example: Your Online Advertising Jargon Buster

An added plus of this strategy is that if you structure your glossary in the form of a question, you have the upside of also qualifying for Google’s “People Also Ask” section which automatically gets a higher and larger placement on the search results pages (SERPs) than standard organic results.

Be sure to have one page that lists each term and when the reader clicks on the keyword phrase to see the definition, that definition is on a new standalone page.

This will also increase the number of relevant pages that Google has the ability to index which is also a very good thing.

Your FAQ page is ready made content

One source of content that you most likely have already is your FAQ page.

Even if you don’t have a FAQ page, you most likely have customer service calls/emails/chats that could be leveraged.

It’s very likely that each question you’ve decided to include in your FAQ is a topic that you can flesh out into a 2 or 3 paragraph blog post that gets a tad more granular.

Even something as mundane as your shipping policies can be fleshed out into a short piece about how you’re using the most cost-effective means possible while ensuring whatever was ordered will arrive at your customers in perfect condition within a timely manner.

The key here is to start looking at what you already have that can be further developed instead of always looking to come up with the next new big idea.

As a bonus, we wanted to include a tactic for the folks selling products as a way to position your content to make it more attractive to the search engines as a tip on a way to really think through how you name your blog posts.

Moving from “Gift Guide” to “Gift Ideas”

When it comes to search (both organic and paid), you really need to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher and not only operate as the marketer.

One search hack that we’ve implemented in the past was to look at how traffic is driven to our “Gift Guide”.

Gift guides have been around since butter was churned by hand and are still being used today as you can still find them on many a retailer’s websites. One subtle change you should think about is that you’ve probably never popped open the Google machine and put in “Father’s Day Gift Guide”.

Mainly because fathers get shafted for this day of celebration and are regulated to socks, ties and the big piece of chicken that evening but also because people type in searches in the same way that they speak and as such, a search for “gift ideas for dad” or “10th-anniversary gift ideas” is much more likely.

The key here is that humans say “gift ideas” and businesses say “gift guides”.

As such, be sure to swap all out those references to “guides” for “ideas” and watch how Madame Google & Mr. Bing all of a sudden will believe that your pages are suddenly more relevant to these types of search queries and you shoot up the SERPs.

Think of what phrases apply to your business and optimise your pages for how people search as oppose to traditional corporate talk and watch the positive effects it can have on search.

Check out HEARTLENT Group’s listing on Marketplace and see how they can improve your social strategy and creative content.