You should treat all your content like financial assets

Sometimes a simple mind-shift about your content creation process can have dramatic effects.

When I say content, this includes web pages, blog posts, lead magnets, case studies, social media posts and other digital content creations that help teach, build community, generate leads and ultimately help generate an income as a blogger.

That mind shift was about how I thought about the end product I was creating.

Instead of thinking of it as “marketing content” or just a “blog post”, I now think of everything I create as Digital Assets.

What is a Digital Asset?

In the finance world, an asset is defined like this.

An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide future benefit. Assets are reported on a company’s balance sheet, and they are bought or created to increase the value of a firm or benefit the firm’s operations. An asset can be thought of as something that in the future can generate cash flow, reduce expenses, improve sales, regardless of whether it’s a company’s manufacturing equipment or a patent on a particular technology. Source: Investopedia

When most people think of assets, they think of stocks, bonds, land or equipment. However, digital assets also fit in the above definition.

I own and control all of my digital assets and they all provide future benefits that increase the value of my business through improved reach, improved sales and increased cash flow.

View your content inventory like a financial portfolio

A good financial portfolio is balanced and contains a mix of assets like stocks, bonds, and other asset types.

 

 

I now look at all my digital assets like a financial portfolio.

My digital portfolio looks more like this

All of these colorful boxes represent the different digital asset types.

All of these digital assets can be monitored and improved.

You can track keywords, link sources, visitors, conversions, stickiness, evergreen value and more for each of these assets.

For some, I can even tie a dollar value to the asset in terms of the cash flow it produces.

Monitor and manage your portfolio

Investors who have portfolios of financial assets need to monitor what’s working and what’s not and then make some changes to incrementally improve.

They either choose to do nothing or invest more time, money and energy into making each asset better.

This is true in content marketing as well

You have to monitor and manage your content portfolio to see how it’s performing.

Some digital assets perform better than others and the decision is to either leave them alone, make them perform better by optimization or repurpose them for something else.

For example, one of my latest digital assets; a blog post about Instagram automation continues to generate hundreds of dollars a month in revenue. I monitor it using Analytics and the Search Console and make tweaks to capture more organic traffic.

I also have some digital assets that don’t generate anything. Traffic or revenue. 🙁

What I’m trying to explain here is that if you’re planning on writing a blog post, it’s better to go in thinking about the piece you are building as a quality asset rather that just a piece of content to generate traffic.

Parting thought

Like any asset, quality is where the value lies and the higher the quality of your content, the better return on investment you will get.

If you’re trying to build an audience with organic search in mind, remember that Google search results are designed to help their user. The more your digital assets align to this, the more successful you will be in attracting organic search traffic.

The next time you sit down to write a new piece of content, approach it with an investment mindset so that you get the most ROI for the time and effort you are putting into it.

Crappy digital assets, provide crappy returns.