A content engine is a system that churns out consistent, high-quality content. It involves humans at the right times and frees creative teams to innovate and experiment.
At its heart, a content engine is all the tools, processes, and best practices that go into creating content that audiences love and search engines understand. It can be built from zero, or it can be put in place to optimize an existing content practice.
It’s the powertrain for an efficient, scalable organic content and community strategy. A content machine that makes creating and optimizing content intentional and predictable.
Content engine is the sound bitey name for the methodology I didn’t really know I was following while building brand love at Tucows and growing Ting Mobile from 0 to 2M followers.
It’s the lessons I took to Mednow, then TubeBuddy and BENlabs, where it drove triple digit traffic growth.
TubeBuddy
- 82% growth YoY in 2023 relative to 2022
- 134% growth H1, 2024 relative to 2023
- 20.7% of all organic traffic driven by blog content (2023)
- 50.6% of all organic traffic driven by blog content (2024)
BENlabs
- 108% growth YoY 2023 relative to 2022
- 627% growth H1, 2024 relative to 2023
- 8.3% of all organic traffic driven by blog content and case studies (2023)
- 76.8% of all organic traffic driven by blog content and case studies (2024)
So that’s what a content engine can do. How do you build a good one? It starts with some key tenets:
1. Turnkey
A well-designed content engine is turnkey. While the processes are documented, the organization doesn’t need to worry about how it works. They just need to love the output and see the performance metrics.
2. Scalable
A content engine can start small but it must be built to scale. As it grows, it becomes better and more efficient.
3. Self-sustaining
It runs like a well-oiled machine. It needs routine maintenance and fuel (and content engine mechanics are always looking for ways to tweak performance). It gives content teams the freedom to think about the what and why instead of the how.
3. Room for creativity
With an efficient content engine in place, a creative team has the freedom to be creative. Want to try a new content format? Go ahead. The engine derisks by allowing quick identification of what works and what doesn’t. Scale the winners, improve or quickly move away from the losers.
4. Intentional content creation
No more random acts of content. Every piece of content has a purpose. The content engine ensures that each output is intentional, aligned with goals, and optimized for impact.
5. Evergreen
A content engine prioritizes content that has long-term value over short-term interest. It finds patterns as opposed to following trends.
6. Create once, publish everywhere
Each piece of content is a reciprocal opportunity. A blog post becomes a video. A video becomes a blog post. A blog series becomes an ebook or guide, a guide or ebook becomes a blog series. A LinkedIn post becomes a blog post, all content feeds the social sharing machine.
7. Optimize and optimize again
Past evergreen content is revisited and revitalized. High-performing evergreen content is further optimized, moderately-performing content is optimized to get more attention than search engines are giving it.
Tip: use templates to manage content processes. Make “revisit and optimize” last subtask for every new blog post and set the date for three or six months after the original posting date.
8. Outsource the drudge work
AI tools are implemented thoughtfully to scale, not replace, human creativity. AI does the drudge work, processes and systems ensures processes are clear and repeatable.
Be lazy or Process is annoying important
Some people get excited by process. I like and admire many of those people. I am not one of them. I appreciate process only insofar as it frees me and the content team to do great creative work.
That’s why I build content engines. A solid content engine creates space for experimentation and derisks “bets.” No one piece of content will make or break the overall content strategy.
It helps if you, like me, get annoyed doing the same things over and over. Rather than just knuckling down and doing that repetitive work, look for ways to automate with AI or create a standard operating procedure (SOP) doc to outsource. Basically, have something or—failing that—someone else do the drudge work for you and your team.
The 80/20 model
A content engine creates a nice 80/20 environment; 80% of effort on the things we know work and 20% on side projects, experiments, testing hypotheses, and generally throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
In other words, it gives content teams the freedom to get creative and try new things. Instead of asking people to become robots It outsources work to artificial intelligence where appropriate and uses process to free, not limit, creativity.
Follow the signals
Content performance analysis is part of the process. With an overall content performance baseline considering blog, social, email, video, lead magnets assets, etc), it becomes easier to make sense of early signals for new content.
Considering content in aggregate relieves some of the pressure: our performance numbers don’t live or die by any one piece of content. The team is freed to try new things and report on their performance knowing that no one piece of content or content experiment (successful or otherwise) will make or break the overall content strategy.
The Tools of the Trade
Building and maintaining a content engine requires tools and processes.
- Project Management: Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, ClickUp, Notion. Whatever task and project management tool you use or choose, you need something to keep processes streamlined and on track.
- SEO Optimization: Every piece of content starts with relevant, attainable keywords. Yoast, SEMrush, MOZ, Ahrefs, Wincher, and other tools can be invaluable in helping content to rank where it matters.
- AI Assistance: ChatGPT, Gemini, Glasp, Midjourney, Claude, Minvo, ElevenLabs and many (many) other AI tools can help to shortcut and scale content creation and ideation.
- Social Sharing: Sprout Social, Loomly, Hootsuite, HeyOrca!, and other tools make it easier to manage a busy social sharing calendar and surface insights to inform social strategy.
- Visuals: Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud Express, Visme, Pixlr, and other graphics tools. Add brand assets and create brand kits to ensure organic content honors visual brand style.
- Data and reporting: Last but certainly not least, content needs to report on its successes and learn from its experiments. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush and other SEO tools help the team tell the story of their content efforts.
You need a content engine
My favorite thing about an efficient content engine is that it empowers content teams small or large to thrive, to pursue new ideas, and to do our best work. It creates an environment where we can experiment (the 20%) because our success is a factor of all our content efforts, not on any single piece of content.
When we find a winning idea, we can add it to the content engine and scale it. When it doesn’t hit as we’d hoped, we can learn the lesson and try again, confident that the 80% will keep growing.
Which brings me to the pitch.
You need a content engine. And I know just the person to help.
It’s me. I’m the person.