In order to succeed with any social media or blog-based strategy, there must be a rotating wheel of content offerings for your subscribers, readers and visitors. While some brands can survive with just standard blog posts, most brands are finding it more difficult to thrive in a situation where they do not engage their audiences with several types of posts and multimedia formats. From videos and podcasts to slideshows and roundup posts, each of these play a part in attracting more people and ensuring your brand reaches as many people as possible. Below, we’ll talk about how you can make the creation of roundup posts – which can be quite time-consuming – faster and more efficient.

Select the Roundup Type

Before you begin trying to put together roundup posts on a regular basis, it helps to have an overall framework and a consistent structure for them. Will you be doing a Top 5 or Top 10 list? How often will you be doing them – weekly, monthly, daily? Do you plan to use keywords in your roundup titles and descriptions? Will you be providing insight into specific blogs or specific posts? By setting up the framework for what type of roundup post you plan to create and when you’ll be creating them, you can start pinging URLs to users via these posts in a more rapid fashion; you’ll be able to filter through what isn’t applicable and start adding only the relevant links and forms of content sooner.

Select the Sources

The next part of creating an efficient process of producing roundup posts is to determine from where you will source your content. This does not mean which specific sites necessary, but through which sources you’ll look for qualifying material. Some people prefer to use the news section of search engines to track down late-breaking items of interest within their niche, while others will scour social media for information and resources across multiple pages and networks. You can even pour through aggregate sites in search of content that ranks well among audiences. There are many different ways to select sources – feel free to mix and match – but having a routine in terms of where to look can save precious time each day, week or month that you’re rounding up content.

Determine How to Promote Cross-Promotion

Last but definitely not least, how do you plan to spread the word to those featured that you are giving them some free publicity? Having a clear idea of how to let those included in your round-ups know they are featured will save lots of time when doing this on a regular basis. Pinging URLs of the content to them via Twitter can prove to be a viable tactic, for instance. Another potential way is by contacting them via email. It is generally a good idea to have a contact template of sorts ready to go so that you can quickly reach out to everyone who is featured in rapid succession. No matter the approach taken, if you include others in your round-ups (as opposed to just re-circulating your own work in a round-up post), then having a template and pre-determined ways on how to push said content to them is a fantastic way to make the process more efficient.