Producing content can be a never ending endeavor that can create weariness if there is not strategic thinking behind it. While a tweet or social media post can last for an hour, your content can live and be repurposed perpetually. It is what gets found in search results and creates deeper reader engagement with visitors searching for answers on your blog or site.
I like to think of a content asset that grows as something that can either be loose and variable or tightly stitched together. A great content site has a natural flow between content I am on and the suggestive or linked content to other articles on the site. It keeps me growing and learning as well as getting familiar with the content authors. This is what makes it either a great asset or a disconnected and isolated place for the lack of natural interrelationships.
In the art and practice of cross-stitching, tight stitches create strength and integrity to the design of a garment. It takes intentionality, a sure hand and attention to the details. Tight cross-stitching shows the uniformity of a design.
Likewise, being able to look at an article and seeing how it is tightly related to the site as a theme or other articles, regardless of how long ago it was written, makes the reader experience fluid and homogenous. The site as a whole builds trust because the articles look like they are part of a greater body of work, not just an isolated piece. It follows a theme that invites readers to delve deeper with engagement and intrigue.
Thinking About Your Content Continuity
Ultimately, every article that is part of your content system is like a stitch in a fabric you are creating. It can be a tight stitch if you think about context for how you write articles and how it references other work. This is why interlinking with your own site articles is important.
Furthermore, keeping the future in mind with how your current content can serve the greater body of unpublished work is important for tight stitching. Each article or call to action that is written needs to be within the style and framework for someone who wants to see congruence around what you believe and purport. It is best to stake your claims and stick with them consistently while supporting them from different angles.
If you want to further tighten the stitching, it may be worthwhile to spend a week and review past articles and create new links to more current articles. This way if a reader lands on a distant past article, they can engage with more current perspectives with newer content. It also provides a fresh way for your content to be optimized with highlights of more recent work.
Overall, each piece of content is part of something that is a larger body of work. Your content assets have great value if the links, context and topic relationships guide a reader to push deeper and wander in a linear fashion inside of your systems and assets.
How can you create tighter stitching with your own body of work and make it more cohesive?
