Content management system or CMS is a grouping of software and services that enables authors to efficiently publish and manage content on the web.
In today’s world, you will find numerous CMSes, each tailored to suit the needs of various industries, but they all feature five essential functions that make them suitable for non-technical writers.
Managing Content
One of the most important functions of any CMS (content management system) is to offer a solution for content publishing. Some CMSes such as WordPress handle this function very well. When you create a new post or page in WordPress, you will immediately see that its content is well-organized and visually pleasing.
WordPress also offers numerous tools that can be used to further polish and optimize your content. For example, you can use the “Live Traffic” tool to monitor and analyze traffic to your blog. The tool provides you with vital information such as the number of visits per day, the time lapse between visits, the location of your visitors, and more.
Creating Content
Creating content is a task that should be made as easy as possible. Since most people, especially bloggers, will be the ones writing these articles, they should be a joy to create.
Many CMSes like WordPress offer a “write” button that makes it easy to get started. Once you’ve written a handful of articles, you can take advantage of the CMS’s free version which provides you with all the tools you need to create content.
Besides simply offering a functional “write” button, many CMSes create content in an organized, structured way that makes it easier for the end user to understand and work with. For example, WordPress’ “visual editor” provides a block-based interface where you can add images, videos, and text to your article — all within the same page. The editor even offers inline spellchecking along with the opportunity to preview your changes in real-time.
Caching Content
Keeping your content fresh is a pain point for most bloggers and content creators. After all, where would they put all that content if it’s not being updated frequently enough?
To solve this problem, some CMSes offer the ability to cache content. What is caching? Simply put, caching is the storing of content locally so that it can be served faster to users. While there are many benefits to caching, one of the biggest is that it provides content updates without the need to constantly regenerate it.
By default, a WordPress blog will cache all content including posts, pages, and comments. This means that whenever you make changes to your content, those changes will be reflected in the subsequent responses from users until you refresh your blog. With caching, you can ensure that your content is always up to date without the need to manually regenerate it.
Managing Media
Nowadays, content is becoming more than just text. Increasingly, marketers are incorporating images, charts, and other types of media into their content to provide a more immersive experience for their audience.
The good thing is that many CMSes offer a solution for managing media. For example, the “visual editor” in WordPress makes it simple to add images, videos, and other media into your content.
Beyond just attaching an image or video to your content, you can even create a fully fledged media object and embed it into your article. With the ability to embed videos, animated GIFs, and other such content, the “visual editor” provides you with all the tools you need to effectively author a media-rich blog post.
Analyzing Performance
While we’re on the subject of content, let’s not forget about its performance. After all, no one likes to spend hours upon hours just to get the content to load or to scroll down on a mobile phone screen. Having a Content Management System that features performance metrics is a definite plus.
Many CMSes like WordPress offer detailed performance metrics for every type of content that is generated. The metrics enable you to identify areas of weakness and provide you with suggestions on how to improve the content’s performance.
For example, if you are struggling with page load times, you can use the Performance dashboard to track the average time it takes for the page to load.
Besides offering performance metrics, many CMSes provide the ability to track content’s performance over time. This means that you can identify patterns in your content’s growth over time and provide you with the ability to track and analyze the content’s performance, engagement rates, and more.
Tracking the performance of your content not only allows you to improve its functionality and aesthetic but also to identify the content that is performing the best. The information can then be used to create more of the same. For that reason, many content creators opt for a CMS that provides all of these features.
Making Dashboards
Although many CMSes provide you with a functional “write” button, it doesn’t mean that they should all look the same. To make the most of what a CMS offers, you will need to build a dashboard that suits your needs. What is a dashboard? Simply put, a dashboard is a collection of metrics and information about your content that you can access from anywhere. In other words, a CMS makes it easy to quickly and efficiently check important aspects of your content’s performance without having to log in to each website or blog individually.
To make a long story short, there are five important things that you need in a dashboard as related to content.
An Aggregator
One of the things that makes a Dashboard special is the inclusion of an Aggregator. An aggregator is simply a tool that provides you with the ability to analyze and combine different types of content, usually from several sources, into a single, cohesive unit. For example, let’s say that you run a blog about fashion trends and you want to create a dashboard that highlights the trends that your readers are most interested in.
You can take advantage of various fashion magazines’ RSS feeds to pull in all of the trending articles into a single place. After you’ve done that, you can use an aggregator, like Dashboard.com, to create a dashboard that features important performance metrics such as article engagements and article CTRs (click-through rates).
Custom Reports
Besides providing you with performance metrics, many CMSes allow you to create customized reports about your content’s performance. What makes these reports special is that you can choose the metrics that you want to use and the dashboard will automatically create the corresponding report for you.
For example, if you wanted to create a monthly report that only shows you the top performing articles from your site, you can use the My Dashboard feature in WordPress to create a customized report and you’ll receive an email notification when the report is ready.
These customized reports can be extremely useful for those who are looking for a simple way to keep track of important information, especially if you’re not familiar with performance metrics or the different ways that they can be interpreted. The reports enable you to identify performance trends across different types of content and channels. Plus, you can use the information to better understand your audience’s interests and build a strategy around that data.
Content Engagement
Content engagement is the measure of how relevant and engaging your content is. Simply put, content engagement is the amount of social interactions that occur as a result of your content, whether that be via likes, shares, or comments.
To create content that is more relevant and engaging to your audience, you can use various metrics, like Click-through rates, to track the performance of your content. However, to do that, you will need to have an idea of what causes traffic and engagement to rise or fall.
For example, let’s say that you’ve published a piece on the most popular Christmas gifts for men. The piece gets enough clicks for you to notice a significant increase in your traffic. However, when you look into the details, you realize that the reason why the article was so successful is because it hit upon a painful truth for many men — namely that most women don’t know what gifts men like and, therefore, they end up spending more money on useless crap. In other words, the content provides value but failed to engage the reader because it lacked a call to action, a clear objective, or both. In this case, you would want to engage the reader by offering a solution — say, an email list where they can receive special deals on quality gifts for men.