It is the age of content (there I go with the cliché) and if your business isn’t producing enough content it is probably being beaten by another business which is producing enough content. And it isn’t just about enough content, your content needs to be highly compelling, interesting, entertaining and useful.
How do you come up with content with such attributes on a regular basis? You cannot keep on writing tutorials and informative articles and blog posts all the time because sooner or later either you will run out of topics or your audience will get bored – it’s only so much they can learn. So how do you go on producing content without sounding trite? You leverage newsjacking.
News is happening all around you. Something new is always happening. New products are being launched, there is a new scandal in Hollywood or Bollywood (the Indian film industry, primarily Hindi), a new cure for an age-old disease is showing promising results, new services are being introduced, algorithmic changes are happening at Google and other search engines, a new “cute cat” or “laughing baby” video is going viral, some fight has broken up somewhere, an international economic conference is going on somewhere else, and so on. Thousands of things are happening in the world. Newsjacking means piggybacking on that news in order to create content for your own business. You will need to be smart, perceptive and of course, creative. Once you develop a knack for it, you will find it quite easy.
A real-world example of newsjacking
As we live in the times of relentless content publishing will also live in the times of cyclones, extreme climatic conditions and storms. Suppose there is a major cyclone building up and during the initial built-up you can easily make out that it is going to be a big news. As a food chain business how can you generate content surrounding this alarming news?
You can make arrangements for free food and shelter in your various strategically shortlisted outlets during the cyclone, publish a blog post explaining the arrangements that you have made and then promote this blog post as much as possible. You can also create multiple blog posts on how to stock food and keep it from spoiling during such emergencies. You can post recipes that can be prepared with little effort. You can write about foods that give energy and nutrition for a long time. You can also prepare a list of foods that give the body warmth during a blizzard or such happening. Once you start writing, you will notice there is lots of stuff you can write about.
The right way of using newsjacking
The relevance of any news is in its timeliness. Establish a system that you can receive relevant news on time so that you can start preparing content preferably before it becomes big news. The first benefit is that you will be publishing something unique and the second benefit is, since there will be a dearth of links, more and more people will be linking to you as a reference rather than mainstream news agencies.