The other day, while rolling out my mat and preparing for some quality asana time, a thought occurred to me: Yoga really isn’t that much different from content marketing.

OK — it’s actually a lot different. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t several lessons businesses can gather from a little time on the mat.

Here are five things we can take away from the practice of yoga.

1. Focus is Essential

Whether you’re attempting a challenging new pose or simply striving to keep from toppling over, yoga requires a great deal of focus. From your breath and weight distribution to your spine alignment, you’re always running through a mental checklist to make the most of every moment.

Focus is also a must for creating great content. In fact, it’s the foundation of content development in general. Developing content without focus can leave you directionless and grasping at straws, because this is the step that will help you determine your purpose. Focus helps you determine the pain points you need to address most and keeps you from wavering into irrelevance.

2. Repetition is Key

You can’t simply jump into a perfect bakasana on your first day of yoga any more than you can expect 100 new leads the first time you publish an eBook or a new blog post. The key to deepening your yoga practice — and growing your audience — is repetition.

For an aspiring yogi, this may mean stretching just a little further each day until you achieve your desired form. In content marketing, though, it means staying the course and continuing to fill your arsenal with well-written, well-researched and highly relevant content. It means regularly publishing blog posts and developing a long-term marketing plan.

3. Mindfulness Over Matter

When you’re creating content, you’re always going to face moments when your brain is seemingly empty of ideas. Everything that can be written on the subject has already been written — or so it would seem. Mindfulness can help you kick the content block.

Mindfulness is a yoga practice that asks you to embrace “purposeful awareness.” In other words, instead of allowing your mind wander to your mountainous to-do list, you bring your attention to the present moment. By taking stock of what’s going on in the here and now, you can find a new angle to approach your seemingly exhausted topic.

4. Always Set an Intention

Goals are crucial to success. That’s a given. But, an intention is slightly different from a goal. In the yoga world, to set an intention is to commit to whatever is most valuable right now. An intention is also a perpetual agreement with yourself — something you aspire to work toward every day. For example, “I choose to live a more peaceful existence” or “I choose to respect my body.”

To be prosperous in content marketing, you first need to set an inbound marketing intention. After all, content marketing is just one piece (albeit a critical one) in the overall inbound marketing puzzle. While you may set an independent goal for each new campaign, all efforts should tie back to the same original intention. For example, “I choose to educate and entertain my prospects and customers,” or “I choose to help my prospects and customers solve their concerns.”

5. Embrace the Personal Journey

Early in my yogic practice, I attended a free class near my apartment. It was so crowded, I could hardly see the instructor, so I followed my neighbor’s lead. However, as the rest of the class lowered into cobra pose, the man next to me rolled back into a shoulder stand. No one batted an eye.

The moral of this story is, while you may practice with others, yoga is an intensely personal journey. As one of my favorite yogis, Adriene Mishler, professes: we each have to “find what feels good.”

Don’t be afraid to take that shoulder stand when the rest of your competitors are striking the cobra pose. It’s a different journey and path for every business, so it’s OK (if not encouraged) to break away from the pack and just do “what feels good” for both you and your audience.

Commitment to the Practice = Success

Often, when businesses think of taking on content marketing, they envision lengthy projects outside the realm of their resources. At first, the idea of publishing even one or two blog posts each month sounds inconceivable, let alone maintaining a weekly blog. It’s overwhelming, it’s scary and, for many, it seems impossible. However, much like yoga, content marketing is a journey that begins with one small step: commitment.

By committing to the practice, you can begin laying the humble foundation upon which you’ll build a tower of powerful, irresistible content. So long as you stay focused, mindful and always seek to learn and grow, your personalized content marketing efforts will help you convert more prospects and help you foster long-term brand loyalty.

Namaste.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”Hubspot-CTA-Leaderboard”]

The post 5 Cornerstones of Yoga That Work for Content Marketing, Too appeared first on Relevance.

Now, one of two things will happen:

• For years, industry leaders will remember this magnum opus, praising you as one of the greatest thinkers of your generation.
• The post receives a couple dozen shares and slowly fades into the ether.

If your content experiences sound more like the second outcome, you’re not alone. Even the most brilliant content seems to have a fleeting shelf life. However, at Kuno Creative, we’ve found a few methods of extending our content’s time in the limelight. Read on to learn how you can get the most mileage out of your content.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

Creating fresh content can be expensive and time-consuming. While the ROI of a well-crafted content strategy can be astronomical, small to mid-size businesses often struggle to find the resources to continually create high-converting, engaging new content.

If the thought of publishing a new blog post daily or a new video each week gives you indigestion, it’s time to take a step back and reassess. While frequency of publishing affects SEO, quality still reigns king. Instead of pumping out several pieces per week, spend your time and energy on fewer, more in-depth efforts.

Take a Cue From History

Often, we talk about repurposing content. (For a hands-on look at the platforms that make repurposing faster, check out our guide to the best content repurposing tools.) But, what does that really mean? Isn’t it bad practice to publish the same content over and over again?

Instead of plagiarizing yourself and bombarding your audience with identical messages over and over, find new ways to address old topics. Dig into your data and seek out past high-performing pieces. If they’re still applicable, brush them off, re-optimize and re-share across multiple channels. For example, if you published a high-converting ebook two years ago, consider making updates and re-releasing as a new edition.

In other cases, you may choose to leverage your best-performing content in new ways. Blog posts can become infographics or SlideShares. A great ebook can become a video series or a podcast. The right social media scheduling tools make it easy to distribute each new format across every channel without manual effort.

Make it Evergreen

We live in an era of flash-in-the-pan trends. What constitutes a breaking story in the morning could be old news by Happy Hour (cough, “the dress,” cough). While it’s important to stay relevant, if your resources are limited you don’t want to focus too much on trending topics that readers may tired of hearing about before you’ve managed to gain any traction.

Unless you have an entire newsroom full of dedicated, trend-spotting, social-focused journalists (à la BuzzFeed), don’t hitch your content to these fleeting moments. Instead, invest your resources in subjects with greater staying power, such as content that educates and instructs. For example, if you sell project management software, “5 Tips for Better Managing Remote Employees” would carry weight longer than “Time Management Lessons from the 2015 Oscars.”

Share the Task of Sharing

You can share your content via your company’s social media accounts and your own personal accounts, but if you really want to ramp up the exposure you have to build an army of sharers.

The best place to start is with your own team. From C-level executives to entry-level administrative staff, marketing professionals to product developers—get all employees involved in sharing. Ensure your team is regularly publishing company content via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and any other channels they frequent. The more people who share, the broader your network and the wider your reach.

Apply the Content Pyramid to Your Strategy

Even when you have a team of brand storytellers and a well-crafted strategy, it’s still difficult to publish enough powerful content to meet demand. Often it feels like you’re only yielding a fraction of a return on your investment of time and effort. Unfortunately, it’s this challenge that leads many businesses to throw in the towel on content.

To solve this issue, Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata, developed the content pyramid—a methodology that helps you get the biggest bang for your content buck.

The base of the pyramid, or the largest chunk of the strategy, is composed of low effort, high frequency curated content such as Tweets and blog comments. Next comes short form content, then infographics and webinars, followed by ebooks and white papers and—at the very top—print books. Although the content grows in effort as you move up the pyramid, the frequency decreases. So, while you may send out 25 Tweets over the course of a campaign, you’ll only write one ebook.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a content marketing “easy button.” But by using repetition, varying content formats and distributing via a mix of owned, earned and paid media, it’s possible to increase the reach and lifespan of your content without putting in much more effort than you already are.

Practice these methods to erase your content expiration date, earn greater acknowledgment of your hard work and ensure a healthy content marketing ROI.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”Hubspot-CTA-Leaderboard”]

The post How to Get the Most Mileage Out of Your Content appeared first on Relevance.