Unlike the English, Spanish, and French that colonized the Americas, Native Americans were known for being incredibly respectful of the buffalo. When a buffalo was killed, the tribe would go to work processing the animal into tools, clothing, and food. (Nothing holds like some good buffalo hoof glue. Am I right?)

As content marketers, we’re often more like the American pioneers than the Native Americans. No, I don’t mean we only bathe once a month.

I mean we can be wasteful. We create a blog post, publish it, toss a link out on Facebook and then start planning the next post. It’s insanity.

When you take the time to create a blog post — ‘buffalo’ that bad boy. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Make images – Put quotes, facts, statistics, and other concise pieces into images and post them to social channels. Use Canva to make dem images super purty.
• Shoot a video – don’t read the whole thing verbatim—write out the high points, practice a few times and roll camera.
• Embed the video – Put the video into the OG blog entry. Research shows pages with embedded video have decreased bounce rates.
• Post to YouTube. Transcribe your YouTube vids (use something like Rev) and post the HTML text under the video for SEO benefit.
• Load the video to your Facebook video library. This way your video will show up in both the main feed and on Facebook Watch.
• Post to IGTV – post exclusive content accessible only to IGTV subscribers.
• Turn it into a webinar training – If your post was a how-to or some kind of educational piece, teach it on a webinar.
• Put it in your welcome email – Create a “best of the blog” series that you send to new email subscribers.
• Send it out as a newsletter – Most marketers email a “teaser” of a blog post and ask the subscriber to click for the rest of the post. Try publishing the entire post in the email. (Kinda like we do with theCLIKK.) When you do this, your open rates will go up.

And we’re just getting started here.

You may not want to go through all of this effort for every blog post, but for posts that do better than average, apply the ‘buffalo’ process.

So, how do you know when a blog post does better than average?

Easy. Measure the Applause Rate. Applause is measured by one or more the following:

• Click-through rate – If you push a teaser of the blog post out to your email list and you get more clicks than average, that’s applause.
• Social Media Shares – Yeah, we know that some call social shares a vanity metric but the truth is that when people share your post, they are giving you a standing O.
• Conversations – Thoughtful comments on your blog post or positive conversations on the social web (use something like Mention for social listening) indicate applause.

Hop into Google Analytics or your email software and look for a blog post that got a lot of applause. When you find it, ‘buffalo’ that sucker.

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