6 Ways to Drip Content Automatically
The biggest benefit you can give to yourself as a business owner is to remove yourself from the equation. That means automate as much of yourself as possible ahead of time so your daily tasks do not become chores.
You might be surprised at all the ways you can pre-schedule your content and your marketing ahead of time and I'm going to explain six ways to do that right now.
1. Blog Drip
When someone says the phrase "drip content" to me, the first thing that comes to mind and the first thing that should come to mind to you is dripping out content on your WordPress blog.
WordPress is the #1 blogging platform and my favorite feature about it has always been that you can schedule content ahead of time with no additional plugins needed. When you're writing a blog post, you can choose to submit it right now or you can change the date on it so it appears as if it was written a long time ago, but you can also change the date to a date in the future – for example, date it to be next week or next month.
That post will remain in a scheduled state until the next week or next month and it will automatically be published for you on a timer. You can set not just the date but the time of day so you know exactly when that next post is coming out.
I highly recommend that instead of sitting and writing out your blog's next week's worth of content, write 4 or 5 short posts and schedule them one month apart. That way, you have the next several months of blog posts already scheduled. And guess what else, if you're using WordPress to run your membership site, you're dripping out content inside your paid membership site as well.
2. Autoresponder Drip
The next easy way to drip content is with your email autoresponder.
You might not have notice it yet but your autoresponder gives you the ability to pre-schedule posts in the same way as your blog. You can write an email that will be sent to your list and set it to tomorrow's date or next week's date, which means that you can write your next month or your next week's worth of autoresponder emails and not have to do anything for that amount of time. You could go on vacation for the next week, schedule your next week's worth of emails and now your business will run even though you are not present.
When you are launching a product, one email simply won't cut it. You need to give people multiple reasons to go check out your offer. You need to give people multiple email reminders getting them to look at your webpage. When you're running a webinar, you should send several emails leading up to the webinar to make sure everyone is on the call.
When you make a blog post, you should send traffic to that blog post and even send reminder emails, which means you can schedule your blog post and schedule your autoresponder emails for that blog post.
3. Sales Letter Drip
If you know a programmer for about $5, you can get content on your sales letter dripped out. There's a little thing called "if else" statements.
That means if you want to slowly increase the price of your product – say increase it by $10 once a week for 5 weeks, you can at a special bit of PHP code that will replace your order button with a new one at a higher price every few days. You can run seasonal specials. For example, every month you could rotate in a different bonus for your offer to give different people a reason to get in.
4. Squeeze Page Drip
You can apply the same "if else" technology that you use on your sales letter to your squeeze page as well and you can use it to do the same things – rotate a monthly or weekly offer, and this can be a different headline, a different bonus or even an entire page swapped out for another.
You can switch out one of your opt-in forms after 2 months for a different one and have the first opt-in form send people to a page where they are supposed to re-tweet one of your free audios, but after 2 months, now direct them to a page where it sends them to your blog, which is now filled up with content.
More often than not, if I have a hard deadline for something, if I know I'm going to increase the price, change the headline, change a redirect, I will set it on this timer instead of doing it manually because otherwise I know I might forget.
5. Social Media
Now that you've dripped out your blog post, install a WordPress plugin such as Twitter Tools to leave a Twitter post or a tweet everytime you make a new blog post.
Also, if I know I'm going to be tweeting about something for the next week or two, I will use a scheduling service such as SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to write tweets but set a publication date on them, which means I can write 10 or 20 tweets a time which will be posted once a day or once a week.
If you don't know what kind of scheduled tweets you should put out there, just use 30-day reminders. If you're posting about a blog post today, schedule another tweet in 30 days, reminding people about that old blog post.
6. Traffic Drip
Even third-party services allow you to drip out your content, even if your content appears on other people's sites.
The Traffic Geyser service allows you to upload up to 90 videos at once and determine when they will be scheduled. (I wish Tube Mogul did too.) When I was using this service for videos, I would record 90 videos at once, upload 90 videos and set the publication date for each and everyone - meaning that I could leave it alone for 3 months and it would send out a new video to the video sites once per day.
EzineArticles even has a premium option which means you can schedule all your articles and determine what date they will be published. Meaning, you can use the same strategy, write or outsource 90 articles, upload and schedule them all and the next 3 months' worth of traffic building are now automatic.
I hope that one of those 6 ways to drip content automatically opened your eyes and made you realized that doing things on a consistent basis doesn't always involve you and doesn't always have to be a chore.
So, which one do you like the best? The blog drip, autoresponder, sales letter, squeeze page, social media, or traffic drip? Post below, letting me know. Thank you.
Filed in: Blogging • Copywriting • Membership Sites • Productivity • Traffic
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I use the blog drip already, and am creating an autoresponder drip – and am in fact thinking of the squeeze page drip.
But thanks for putting it all into one article. The combined inspiration is phenomenal, Robert. 🙂
Wow, I’ve never heard of some of these methods — thank you so much for the education. You give a lot of info and the clear steps for doing it all. Ezine articles are my next step in promoting my stress reduction products but I’ll keep the rest in mind. I do already preschedule blog posts but the other drips are “TK” – to come! 🙂
Hi Robert,
All the posts this month have been fantastic and a lot of useful info. Drip-feed is a great method for spending a whole day or week even loading content into blogs and email lists.
I have several lists in very different niches. Some I only schedule broadcast emails and in other niches I simply use follow ups for an extended period of time. I know this is ok to do if the content will be relevant for a duration of time however in the internet marketing niche, it’s got to be broadcasts which won’t be fully automated unless you hire someone else to do it and that won’t be personal enough.
Great info this month Robert,
Cheers
John
Every time I read one of your posts I realize how much I do not know. I was aware of software that would allow me to schedule blog posts but was completely unaware of the fact it could be done from within WordPress.
I was also unaware of some of the other things you mentioned in this post but I believe the auto drip from within WordPress will be the one that helps me the most and the quickest.
As always thanks for your insight and great help,
Clyde
I use the blog and the autoresponder and to a point the sales drip but haven’t tried the others.
May have to now 😉
I use the blog drip and autoresponder drip all the time… it saves so much time
When I was into twitter I used SocialOomph a lot, but now I don’t think twitter is really worth my time
As far as dripping content in Ezine articles I would just save the articles as drafts, then submit them for review every once in awhile – although I’m not big on Ezine articles
I like the social media drip and the blog drip the best. WordPress and SocialOomph are my friends!
Thanks for opening my eyes to some other ways to “drip”, as well.
Melanie
I am working on a combination of the blog,the autoresponder and the social media drip. I am writing blog posts, then a quick highlight for the autoresponder, then 3-4 tweets for twitter.
After reading this, I think I should highlight 3-4 things for the autoresponder and drip out over several days.
Thanks Robert.
I have been using the autoresponder drip and the blog drip, but never heard of some of the others. I’ll use those too. Thanks Robert.
I use your unique drip plugin to automatically schedule content delivery inside my membership sites, and plan on using the sales letter drip functions in the near future.
Robert,
I’ve heard of these methods but it’s always good to get a reminder now and then. For those of you that don’t know Robert has some products on PHP that can allow you to create the if else statements he’s talking about. I’ve used those courses – the code is cut and paste and very easy to use.
Rodney
the only “dripping” I was aware of before this post was thru Datafeedr e-commerce sites, and the DAP membership site software…
thanks for the great ideas Robert!
Mtn Jim
p.s. NOW I’m curious…how do you send us to that sales page immediately after we hit the “submit comment” button?
thanks,
Mtn Jim
Robert,
I have the same question as Jim Fisher. What plugin allows you to send us to another page or sign us up for an email list.
Rodney
Rodney and Jim,
Action Comments allows you to set a redirect URL people go to after commenting… for your entire blog, one specific category, or an individual blog post.
I think everyone here either does realize or should realize that this is probably THE most important post you’ve made – all your info is phenomenal but this will save everyone time – time they can then use to implement your other info or purchase your other products! I would not have been able to keep up with the two blog challenges this year if I had not known how to drip content. I got all my posts done in two days (1 set one weekend and another set the next) and then just scheduled them all. But you’ve given me some courage to look at my aweber account and their little blip about blog posting thru them. Not totally sure what it’s about but i am going to check it out.
You are absolutely the best Robert!
Terrie
Robert – about the action comments – where can you put that it should redirect you? I can’t find that in my settings unless you’re supposed to put it in the aweber (AR) form?
Terrie
You can edit the individual post to do it.
I have a question that maybe someone here can answer. I want to setup a blog that contains useful and interesting information, but our company does retirement plans so this is not always very exciting. My idea is to setup an email drip campaign and somehow link it to someones financial blog. Any ideas on how to do this and keep our company branding?
Hi,
I liked the Traffic dip system. Would like to know the tools which can help us to work this on our website.
Thanks