It’s Paws & Promote: A 30-Day Content Creation Challenge time! You may be wondering “What on earth is Paws & Promote?” Paws & Promote is our take on NaNoWriMo, which was originally a way to kick start budding writers into getting 50,000 words of a novel done. 

Here at Click & Repeat we’ve taken the concept but given it a slight business tweak – every year we run a competition to encourage dog trainers to get 30 blog posts (or podcasts, reels, or YouTube videos) drafted out. 

The content you create during Paws & Promote doesn’t have to be publication ready. A rough first draft (sometimes called ‘the ugly draft’ by professional writers) is all you need. Polishing can come later.

Why join us?

Well. Firstly, there are prizes. And who doesn’t want to win prizes?

And secondly, because having the rough first draft of 30 pieces of content ‘in the bank’ will help you plan – and actually create – useable marketing content for the year ahead. Think of Paws & Promote as a savings strategy, where your savings aren’t dollars but the first draft of blog posts ready to be pulled out, polished and published.

Why only a first draft?

Surprisingly, it’s more efficient to write a rough first draft and THEN polish it for publication later than it is to try to do the two steps together. Don’t try to create and edit at the same time! That way leads to madness, stress, and swearing you’re never going to write another post!

Why create a content bank?

Right now, the thought of creating a content bank for your business might seem overwhelming.  What’s the point? The major advantage of a content bank is it allows you to plan ahead. Which is beneficial for your content creation efforts in so many ways. It allows you to:

Plan a content strategy

Rather than just churning out a weekly blog post because you know you should – with no idea of how each post fits into a bigger picture to promote your business – a strategy allows you to plan the goals for each piece you write. 

Goals for every bit of content? Yep! Every blog post you write needs to have a business goal. Think about what it is you want to achieve with each blog – ask yourself, do you want to:

• Create engagement with your current clients?
• Get new eyes on your business?
• Promote a service or class you’re offering?
• Showcase your expertise?

It’s far easier to get a balanced mix over time if you already have pre-prepared blog posts to draw on and can easily see if you’re lacking content aimed at a specific goal.

We’ll be talking about creating a content strategy in more depth in a later post but for now, just know that writing posts for the sake of having posts won’t necessarily get you the marketing results you want.

Batch create content around the same topic

It’s far easier to write a whole swathe of content on one topic in one batch and then split it up for publication later. Once you’re on a roll you can just keep going until you reach the natural end point of the subject. Then, split out your posts and drip publish them over weeks or even months.

Reduce the feast/famine cycle

You know you should be marketing your business all the time. But dog trainers periodically find themselves swamped with business and marketing gets put on the back burner.  Then the customer influx dries up and…there’s no more in the pipeline because the marketing also dried up while they were servicing clients 24/7. However, it’s easy to keep putting marketing content out, even if you’re super busy, if you have it pre-prepared. 

Speed up the content creation process

When you know there’s no immediate necessity to publish a piece you can concentrate on the creation and development of the ideas you want to convey, knowing you can refine and polish it later. This makes the writing process faster.

Make social marketing media easier

Having a bank of blog posts also gives you a bank of social media posts. Each blog can be used to create between four and nine social posts. Sure, you need to cut the original blog up and reformat it, but you don’t have to think of each social post from scratch – which is usually the hardest bit.

Recycling marketing content

A content bank also has one other major advantage: it makes it easy to recycle older content. (No, reusing your content isn’t cheating!) 

Once you have a library of blog posts you can start mixing older material in with new content. Maybe you write 52 brand new blog posts this year. Then next year you might only need to write 40 new ones because you can re-promote 12. And the year after you only need to create 25 because you have a back catalog of older posts you can re-promote.

If you have promotional content that links to a service or class you only offer on a seasonal basis (so not rolling around every six weeks etc.) there’s nothing wrong in promoting that content each time it’s appropriate. 

For example, let’s say you have a loose leash walking class you run each fall. You can create some new social media posts to promote your (older) blog about teaching the first steps of LLW. 

And it’s not just promotional content you can reuse. Any blog on an ‘evergreen’ topic (one that is relevant year after year) is recyclable content. So “how to…” posts, case studies, even “The X best…” reviews or recommendation type posts, can all be reused with a bit of updating. 

If you’re savvy, you’ll save your best social media posts too. They can be reused every few months – or given a quick refresh to update them. It’s still quicker to update material than it is to start from nothing. 

To do this you need to have a way of keeping track of what’s worth reusing. It pays to have a system that’s easy for you to search and access what you need when you need it, so spend some time developing a system that works for you.

How to refresh older content

Most of the time older content will need a bit of a spit ‘n’ polish to bring it up to spec. Few people can read what they wrote three years ago without wanting to change something. So how do you go about updating an older blog post for reuse?

Firstly, review the content and topic of the post. Check:

• Is the content still correct? Or have the recommendations changed?
• Do you now have better quality pics, videos, examples or other resources that should be added?
• Do you need to update the wording?
• Do you still teach ‘the thing’ the same way? If you’ve changed your training method consider adding a section along the lines of “I used to do it that way but now I do it this way. Here’s why…”
• Check that your links still work and consider adding new internal and external links.
• Add a note telling the reader when the post was originally published and give its new publication date. (E.g., *Originally published in June 2022, updated for completeness in July 2024.)

The techie bit of updating published posts

Once you’ve made your updates to the content of the post, you have choices. You can either change the publication date so it moves to the top of your blog post archive, or you can leave the date as is and just re-promote it. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it.

If you’re using an SEO plugin such as RankMath (the plugin we recommend) it should automatically re-submit your refreshed post to Google for re-crawling and indexing. 

Even if you don’t have a plugin that’ll do the tech stuff for you, Google should re-crawl and index the updated post anyway because the content has changed. (We can make no promises about that though – Google doesn’t always do what you’d expect.)

Hopefully you can now see why creating a content bank is well worth the time and effort. The business benefits go far beyond just having a few posts roughed out; it gives you flexibility and reduces the ‘throwing spaghetti at the wall’ approach to marketing.

So why not join us in Paws & Promote this year and start building that content bank right now?